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Pellets are the lifeblood of your home’s heating system when a pellet stove is your primary heat source. Most folks don’t even give the pick-up, transport, or storage of them a second thought. I didn’t, either. Not until we ended up using wet pellets because of transporting them in the rain. What a mess. Keeping your pellets dry is critical to the uninterrupted use of your pellet stove during cold weather months.
We usually have a full pallet (50 bags) delivered to our place in the later summer/early fall when our co-op runs specials on them. After our family chain-gangs them into the basement, we are ready to roll for the winter. Complementing the pellet stove is an oil furnace that we use sparingly during that time of the year. Combined, a pallet of pellets is usually enough to get us through winter with about ten bags leftover.
Not a Normal Year
Enter COVID-era destruction. One lay-off and school shutdown later, me and the Jo are home all day long. I’m writing, and he’s entering the 6th grade as a remote student. We are now running our Quadrafire Mt Vernon AE hard, and already using at least twice the fuel we would normally use. As the temperatures dip into the 20s, our 106-year-old lathe and plaster walls simply can’t keep the heat in as well. We use even more.
Ripping through the dozen bags of pellets we had leftover from last year, plus the 50 bags we picked up in October, we also burned through 250 gallons of furnace oil. At $3 per gallon . . . well, you can do the math. $3 + 250 gallons = that shit ain’t getting refilled until the off-season. It is RIDICULOUSLY expensive to fill the tank, and it doesn’t last long. So, off we go to pick up a half-pallet of pellets. Mid-winter. In the pouring Washington rain.
Using Wet Mushy Pellets – Don’t Do It!
Ideally, you have your pellets delivered or pick them up when it’s fair weather. A truck with a canopy is helpful if you have to get them during bad weather. Unfortunately, we ran out during a stretch of rain, and we don’t have a canopy. That didn’t change the fact that we still had to pick some up!
Twenty-five bags of pellets were drenched after we got home. As if that wasn’t enough, I decided to throw a tarp over the load and leave them in the back of the truck overnight.
Don’t do this. Even with a tarp over them, moisture still managed to creep its way in after 10 hours. One of the bags of pellets had completely disintegrated and swelled up to the point of splitting the plastic bag open. Fifteen more bags got damp and had about 80% solid pellets. The other 20% was pure sawdust from the pellets breaking up. The last nine bags were varying degrees of mostly solid pellets.
More than likely, the solid pellets are okay to use. I recommend screening out the extra sawdust from the exploded pellets and using the pellets that are still whole. When you dump the whole mix in, that loose sawdust gets pulled up by the auger, accumulates, and gets caked inside the auger feed tube and drop tube.
Fixing your pellet stove and conducting maintenance periodically is a necessary evil. When you attempt to use wet pellets, your pellet stove will soon crunch, clunk, grind, and error out. You’ll be working on it much sooner than you anticipated.
Auger Jammed
If you went against sage advice or your inner voice telling you not to use wet pellets – you are now seeing the “auger jammed” message. You may have been cussing like a sailor while frantically searching Google, where you came across this article!
Typically, if it’s a simple pellet jam, you can “unstick it” by either cleaning out the hopper and/or using a tool up the drop tube to clear the jam.
With wet pellets that have turned partly into sawdust and are clogging the auger and auger feed tube, you will have repeated “auger jammed” errors. Basically, your auger is dead in its tracks. If you unplug and restart, it will try to clear itself, but you will see that annoying error message before it gets a chance to drop pellets into the firepot.
DON’T PANIC!
This is an easy fix. If you have a freestanding pellet stove it will be super easy to get in and clean out the auger jam. If you have an insert, like us, it is a little more challenging.
The Fix After Using Wet Pellets
I am not a fan of pellet stoves. Having a rocky past with them since 2010, time has not done much to quell my ambivalence towards them. Never mind the lack of romantic Norman Rockwell-ish atmosphere and that wonderfully infused smell of a wood stove that permeates every fiber of a home’s interior over the years – the kind that reminds you of Grandma and Grandpa’s farm.
However, the historic 1915 Craftsman we moved into had a Quadrafire Mt. Vernon AE insert. With all the other renovation work to be done, swapping it out for a wood stove was not in the cards. I have grown to like it when it’s working right. I can’t deny its convenience, even with its periodic bouts of petulance. I love chopping wood, but my old man back does not
So, owning a pellet stove over a wood-burning stove is just as well. Call it love/hate or a twisted relationship – whatever. They have delicate wiring systems, can be finicky, jam, and go down when you least expect it during the most inopportune time.
However, fixing your pellet stove after using wet pellets is simple. You will remove the auger and vacuum everything out until no damp, cakey, sawdust remains! I show you the work on our Quadrafire Mt. Vernon AE pellet stove in the video, but I will outline the basic steps here.
Instructions
Work is done on a Quadrafire Mt. Vernon AE model pellet stove insert. Yours may be slightly different and may not include an optical sensor.
Materials Needed
- #2 or #3 Philips head screwdriver
- Shop-Vac, preferably with micro cleaning tool attachment set
Steps
- Unplug the stove from the power source.
- Remove all unused pellets from the hopper.
- Disconnect the hopper sensor wire connector and move out of the way.
- Pull any wires running along the vacuum switch out of the white clasp and move them down out of the way. This is only to ensure you don’t press these wires against the edge of the vacuum switch while working, potentially breaking them.
- Locate the auger feed motor. On the right side, there is a wiring harness connector for the optical sensor. It is difficult to see, but it needs to be disconnected before removing the auger. Depress the release clip on top and disconnect.
- The auger feed system is held in place by two hooks at the top and one screw at the bottom. On the face of the auger feed motor assembly, there are four screws. A fifth screw lies below these. Loosen this screw, remove it, and push it up, releasing the whole auger feed assembly.
- Pull the auger out partially. I recommend having the Shop-Vac hose in one hand, vacuuming falling sawdust, while pulling the auger out a little at a time. You can go ahead and just pull the whole thing out in one shot, but you’ll have a mess to clean up inside your unit. Your choice.
- Completely remove the auger assembly and set it down to the side.
- Thoroughly and deeply vacuum the auger feed tube and into the upper part of the drop tube, getting out all the sawdust and any remaining pellets in there. Remove the vacuum switch hose and blow it out with compressed air. Vacuum and/or wipe down the auger if needed.
- Thoroughly vacuum out the hopper, and inside the stove where there is sure to be a lot of residue from burnt-up sawdust. Don’t forget to hit the firepot. Remove the baffle and vacuum the backside of it. Using the micro cleaning kit, vacuum the heat exchanger and exhaust exits.
Finishing Up
Congrats, you have now fixed your pellet stove in the aftermath of using wet pellets! Once you carefully insert and screw the auger back into place, reconnect the optical and hopper sensors, then move the other wires back into their clasps. You are ready to fire it back up.
Plug your stove back in and do a test run with a small number of pellets, like 10 or 15% of the hopper capacity. Once your pellet stove is back up, fill the hopper with pellets.
Make sure to check out the video! As a bonus, I also attempt a temporary fix and show you how to replace the optical sensor after I destroy the wiring on it. You don’t wanna miss that!
Interested in adding a built-in, under-the-counter wine or beverage cooler to your kitchen? Check out How To Install a Phiestina Beverage Cooler
Our pellet stove got wet and there were pellets in it, well we didn’t think about taking the pellets out and forgot about for about a month , and now it is swollen to one hard pellet all the way up the auger, what do we do ?
Holy . . . I’ve never even heard of that happening! I envision your auger encased in a swollen, hardened mass of wood. I would probably first access the front of your stove and try to break it up in the drop tube with an implement like an old wire hanger or longer screwdriver that you can get up inside. I would then remove the auger itself. That might take some heaving. The act of removing the auger should break up the pellet mass quite a bit. Possibly enough to continue breaking up chunks and vacuuming it out with a Shop Vac. From there, try chiseling away at the rest of it and vacuuming the pieces out.
Have you tried doing any of that yet?