Tweet
This thing is about to put me over the edge. I am a 40 year veteran of service to Mercedes, Ferrari and other high line euro cars, know a little about a lot of things and this little heater is about to eat my lunch
Unit = Monitor 41 about 12 or 15 years old - has not given a minutes grief the entire time. It operates in a clean environment with the electronics being protected by a decent surge protector.
Problem = About three weeks ago the heater began to act weird. It would heat and cycle properly for a few days and then begin a peculiar gyration. It would heat and then refuse to cycle. Instead the flame LED began to flash and the machine would cycle down not to re-light.
As the days passed the intervals between lift off and shut down with the flashing flame light became shorter until the heater became just about useless.
I pulled the lid off of the burner pot and couldn't find/see anything wrong. I tested the fuel and replaced the tank filter outside and then checked the in-unit strainer. It was clean a whistle.
Then I called a service tech who advertises himself as being enlightened in the ways of Monitors. He replaced the mat at the bottom of the chamber, the dome thingy that fits over that and the metal probe and line that fits into the side of the burner pot and runs over to the main circuit board.
I didn't see the original mat and although he tried to point to some flaw in the dome thing, all I could see was what appeared to be a slight surface texture difference in a spot about a half inch long and three sixteenths of an inch wide. He seemed to think that the surface change was hiding a crack, but I have worked with lots of alloys in my time and couldn't see any such possibility. Never the less I let him install a new one. As he was beginning to button things up he suddenly decided that the probe, I suppose it is a temperature probe, needed replacing. He admitted that he had mixed feeling about the need, but I felt like another twenty bucks or so for a known good part wasn't too much to ask for an operational heater.
We stood there and watched the heater go through several cycles and he left. All seemed well enough until for the next few hours until I went to bed. The next morning though I found the flame light flashing and the machine silent. Bummer !
I pulled the top off of the combustion can again this afternoon and found nothing obviously wrong. The dome thing was installed correctly and the mat had not curled up at all. I did note though that the mat that the tech had installed seemed a little "cheaply cut". It didn't come close to covering the entire bottom of the can and was far from being rectilinearly exactly square. It was also held down by four small globs of black adhesive (?) at each corner.
I wire brushed the inside of the metal burner ring, the part that has all of the small holes in it and vacuumed out all of the debris and then reinstalled the domed thingy.
Once back together enough for a test run I pushed the orange button and the heater from heck started up. It went through about 150 seconds of what must have been a purge cycle and then began to light up. The flame LEDs marched up scale slowly over a period of a few minutes, while the burner began to operate.
The "flame" was just a very light yellow glow for the first little while and then began to get more intense as I could begin to see some actual flamage, light but there and still yellow. As things progressed the yellow flame became larger and there was obviously heat being cooked up and blown out the front of the machine until a couple of minutes later when the thing abruptly shut down with the flame LEDs flashing.
I let it cool completely down and then pushed the orange button again. The ambient temp read 66 degrees and I had the target temp set at 68. All went well for two cycles. The larger yellow flame seem to abate quite a bit in the second cycle and was replaced by a blue flame around most of the ring. This blue flame was not completely even, some places being a bit higher than other, but at least it was blue.
This worked for two cycles until on the third cycle the burner went into it's earlier fits and the flame LEDs began to flash as the machine cycled off.
This heater is a pretty simple device, I know, but every attempt to isolate a single possible cause of these failures or to catch the thing doing something in a repeatable order seems to be impossible.
I just have this feeling that my circumstances cannot be a "first" or isolated incident, and that someone somewhere out there has experienced the exact same problem and has been able to overcome it.
I have searched several sites looking for answers, even the Al's Heating site from up in Maine. That fellow really has it in for Monitors and the company in general. I suspect that he might be able to point me in the right direction, but he doesn't take calls except for from 7P until 11PM and I am not in the mood to spar with someone whom is most likely just wanting to throw bombs at my Monitor anyway.
So that is the story from down here in the North Carolina mountains. I would be most happy to listen to someone who has "been there" with these 41 heaters and I do hope that some help will come my way.
BTW: Be unnecessarily kind. Everyone that you meet is battling some sort of issue in their life and adding to their burden benefits no one.
Jack
Unit = Monitor 41 about 12 or 15 years old - has not given a minutes grief the entire time. It operates in a clean environment with the electronics being protected by a decent surge protector.
Problem = About three weeks ago the heater began to act weird. It would heat and cycle properly for a few days and then begin a peculiar gyration. It would heat and then refuse to cycle. Instead the flame LED began to flash and the machine would cycle down not to re-light.
As the days passed the intervals between lift off and shut down with the flashing flame light became shorter until the heater became just about useless.
I pulled the lid off of the burner pot and couldn't find/see anything wrong. I tested the fuel and replaced the tank filter outside and then checked the in-unit strainer. It was clean a whistle.
Then I called a service tech who advertises himself as being enlightened in the ways of Monitors. He replaced the mat at the bottom of the chamber, the dome thingy that fits over that and the metal probe and line that fits into the side of the burner pot and runs over to the main circuit board.
I didn't see the original mat and although he tried to point to some flaw in the dome thing, all I could see was what appeared to be a slight surface texture difference in a spot about a half inch long and three sixteenths of an inch wide. He seemed to think that the surface change was hiding a crack, but I have worked with lots of alloys in my time and couldn't see any such possibility. Never the less I let him install a new one. As he was beginning to button things up he suddenly decided that the probe, I suppose it is a temperature probe, needed replacing. He admitted that he had mixed feeling about the need, but I felt like another twenty bucks or so for a known good part wasn't too much to ask for an operational heater.
We stood there and watched the heater go through several cycles and he left. All seemed well enough until for the next few hours until I went to bed. The next morning though I found the flame light flashing and the machine silent. Bummer !
I pulled the top off of the combustion can again this afternoon and found nothing obviously wrong. The dome thing was installed correctly and the mat had not curled up at all. I did note though that the mat that the tech had installed seemed a little "cheaply cut". It didn't come close to covering the entire bottom of the can and was far from being rectilinearly exactly square. It was also held down by four small globs of black adhesive (?) at each corner.
I wire brushed the inside of the metal burner ring, the part that has all of the small holes in it and vacuumed out all of the debris and then reinstalled the domed thingy.
Once back together enough for a test run I pushed the orange button and the heater from heck started up. It went through about 150 seconds of what must have been a purge cycle and then began to light up. The flame LEDs marched up scale slowly over a period of a few minutes, while the burner began to operate.
The "flame" was just a very light yellow glow for the first little while and then began to get more intense as I could begin to see some actual flamage, light but there and still yellow. As things progressed the yellow flame became larger and there was obviously heat being cooked up and blown out the front of the machine until a couple of minutes later when the thing abruptly shut down with the flame LEDs flashing.
I let it cool completely down and then pushed the orange button again. The ambient temp read 66 degrees and I had the target temp set at 68. All went well for two cycles. The larger yellow flame seem to abate quite a bit in the second cycle and was replaced by a blue flame around most of the ring. This blue flame was not completely even, some places being a bit higher than other, but at least it was blue.
This worked for two cycles until on the third cycle the burner went into it's earlier fits and the flame LEDs began to flash as the machine cycled off.
This heater is a pretty simple device, I know, but every attempt to isolate a single possible cause of these failures or to catch the thing doing something in a repeatable order seems to be impossible.
I just have this feeling that my circumstances cannot be a "first" or isolated incident, and that someone somewhere out there has experienced the exact same problem and has been able to overcome it.
I have searched several sites looking for answers, even the Al's Heating site from up in Maine. That fellow really has it in for Monitors and the company in general. I suspect that he might be able to point me in the right direction, but he doesn't take calls except for from 7P until 11PM and I am not in the mood to spar with someone whom is most likely just wanting to throw bombs at my Monitor anyway.
So that is the story from down here in the North Carolina mountains. I would be most happy to listen to someone who has "been there" with these 41 heaters and I do hope that some help will come my way.
BTW: Be unnecessarily kind. Everyone that you meet is battling some sort of issue in their life and adding to their burden benefits no one.
Jack
Comment