Lost power yesterday. Hooked up generator and went about my business. Heat was working fine. Shut gen down for the night. Started gen this morning, powered everything up.....but no heat. Everything seems to be doing what it should, Tstat calling for heat, Tekmar recognizing mixing demand, primary and secondary circs running, but boiler wont fire. Burnham mpo84 with a Beckett burner and Honeywell r7184p control on burner. The green light on the Honeywell is not lit and I have performed the hard resets on it to no avail. Could this control be bad?

 

Oh... that's not good...

I guess it could be bad. Are you sure you have power to it?

How much snow didja get?

 

Portable generators can have poor voltage regulation, surges, etc. It's conceivable that something in your solid-state boiler controls got zapped.

When supplying power from a standby generator to solid-state, computerized equipment, might be best to use an uninterruptiple power supply between the generator and the solid-state equipment.

 

We probably got around 8". The trees and powerlines around here took a beating though. The dirty unmetered voltage produced by generators is definitely a problem. Electronics are so sensitive and vulnerable to spikes its Rediculous. I jumped out the Honeywell and got the boiler running so im Assuming that's the problem. I guess ill find out tomorrow for sure(hopefully).

 

Yup, it was the primary control on the burner. Guy at supply house said that since all these controls started switching over to solid state construction he's sold more in the last couple years than in the last 20 combined. Said he has a customer that pops a aquastat every time he loses power. Damn electronics. Cost me $100 today, and $150 last month for an aquastat. Killing me.

 

Still have the old one? .......................

 

This prompts a question. If someone has a gas-fired boiler with computerized controls (I don't, thankfully), is there any problem with replacing the whole shebang with mechanical aquastat, GuardDog low water cutout, standing pilot, no outdoor reset, mechanical relays, 24-V thermostat, etc. - all hard-wired with point-to-point wiring? No LEDs, no error codes, etc. If there is a problem, just pull out your multimeter to troubleshoot. Sort of like a 1955 Chevy (or perhaps my old 1937 Plymouth).

I'm standing by in my flameproof, asbestos suit. (I kind of wish they still made them.)

 

I still have the old one. You want I should do something with it? And gil, I do wish I had an "alternate" plan that my wife could enact should something go wrong in my absence. Which are quite frequent and attract disaster.

 

Hello,
I'm afraid it might not be that easy, at least with a typical UPS.
My neighbor was kind enought to let me plug into his generator on day 2 for the refirigerator and a few lights.
That part worked great.
I also had a very big APC-UPS that i used the night before for lights.
After the frig finally cooled off 4 hours later, i unplugged it and plugged in the UPS to charge the battery. Not much luck.
What happened is it went into a wierd oscillation. Every time the UPS would go into charging mode, i coud hear the generator slow down a fraction, the voltage would drop, the UPS would sense it and cut out. The genertor would stabilize, then the UPS would switch back to line power and the cycle happened again.
Endlessly. After 15 minutes i unplugged it, being afraid it was doing more harm than good.

I think it would take something more like a line conditioner or some sort of complete regeneration of the AC wave form to really clean up dirty generator power.
High end expensive UPS's might have such a feature built in, i'm not sure.

Peter

 

Peter - that's good info to know about the UPS. Thanks.