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I really wish I could just say we turned it on and it worked. Not quite. The birth of this web site involved me being down in the basement trying to figure out what was going on with this new $10,000 investment. It was a scary time, what with the wife standing over my sholder asking me if we had done the right thing. In this article I cronical my adventures in first burning corn.
 I really wish I could just say we turned it on and it worked. Not quite.
Here is a shot of the unit loaded up with corn. This is three bags of corn in the hopper in this shot. Roughly 150lbs. I have decided to buy bagged corn for a bit, and maybe this whole season while I figure out just how much corn with go through. I would really like to do some work on the coal bin this summer, put in a wood floor, and stud out the walls, etc. To make it more sutiable for storing fuel that can rot, rather than the coal it was used to storing in days past.
The corn I have been able to get seems like it is quite dry. It has some cob in it, and some short bits of stalk. I have not seen anything longer than four inches, and only one of those that sized. Most of the rest of the peices have been smaller. I really wish the corn were screened better though.
 To the left is a picture of the burn pot. It is made out of a heavy gage stainless steel and has a slide bottom as one of it's advertised features. I am not sure of the practicality of that, however. The bottom will not slide out without removing the pot from the fire chamber. It seems like it might be a handy feature if there was enough room to slide it while it is in place. It would be nice to remove the clinker from the pot without removing the whole thing. The holes around the inside are for air flow from the draft fan.
Let me start by saying the documentation provided by Traeger is some of the worst. The documentation that ships with the unit is printed in book form, but then it is stapled up in the corner. So what this means is you look at a page and it will have page 12 on one side and page 23 on the other. I wish that were really the only problem. It wasn't. The diagrams seemed to span several generations of boilers so the parts look different or end up in different places. The documentation might tell you to turn on the service switch, but I challenge you to find such a switch on the unit. Also, the step by step instructions for lighting the unit pretty much leave off once the auger has begun to feed corn into the system. If you want to know what it should be set at for opertion you better go digging. I don't really know if that is because the primary audenence for this type of unit is someone who is already a licensed boiler opertator and will only give these documents a curtsery glance anyway? I think though as these types of heating systems try to move more from industrial setting to the fringe heating systems in homes and then hopefully into the mainstream they will have to become better.
I would really like to see more information about what each one of these controls does. I have a switch that is labeled pilot cycle 8/16. Nowhere can I find in the documentation what these two settings mean. Instead, one part of the book tells you to set it one way, and on the next page it tells you to set it another. If I had an explaination of what it is, then I can make informed decisions about how I should operate my boiler. Instead I don't know if I should set it the way it mentions in one part of the documentation or the other. I have it set as shown in the picture at 8 minutes. What I think this means is the number of minutes between times the feed auger runs when the thermostat is not calling for heat. Would it burn less corn if I set it at 16? Or would the fire go out? Or is this really too subjective for Traeger to offer an opionion on? I will try to do some experiments later on so read through all of these pages and if I figure anything out about this panel I will report it.
Check the photo at the right? Have you found that service switch? I assume, from context, they are talking about the "draft fan/feed system" switch but I am not so sure they aren't refuring to the service disconnect over on the wall. I think better documentation would really have made this whole experience much better. It would have given me a much better sense of knowing what I was doing the first time I lit up that fire.
 Here is a picture of the very first fire in the firepot. What happened the first night of running the corn boiler:
I got the fire started and after a period of time the temperature came up enough to kick in the feed system. The system seemed to work ok for a while but then the boiler temperature started to climb. ...and climb. What was happening was the main part of the house was already warm enough. The thermostat in the addition however was calling for heat. We have about 24 feet of raditator back there so it takes some time for the area to heat up but while the thermostat is calling for heat the feed augers keep feeding more and more corn into the unit. The feed auger is running ten minutes feed, three minutes off. Boiler temperature continues to rise. The whole basement is getting hot at this point. Boiler temperature is up to around 260 degrees and I am getting worried to be in the same room. :-) Finally I decide enough is enough and I turn up the thermostat in the main part of the house just to dump the heat. This immediatly drops the boiler temperature down to about 90 degrees. But this causes another condition. The feed auger goes into continous feed mode. This afer a couple of hours chokes out the fire but still continues to feed corn into the burn pot. I was upstairs by this point and when I came back down, what a mess. The corn pot and ash tray were full of blackend corn. Lots of smoke in the basement.
  
I figured I must have done something wrong. Attempt two however went much the same, however. I didn't let it get nearly so out of control though. It really seemed like something was going wrong. I felt like a phone call up to Traeger was in order. It was just a few minutes into the conversation, and if I may take a few seconds to make fun of our Canadian Neighbors, the guy I was talking to said in his best Doug McKenzie voice... "Eh, you got a bad draft fan, eh" :-)
Problem Solved
 Two days later FedEx was at the door with a new draft fan. It was about about a fifteen minute job to drop in the new fan. I noticed immediatly that I must have indeed had a bad fan. Whereas the old fan had barely made any noise at all (because it was barely turning) the new fan sounded like a regular running fan. Roughly the same time I had a drop in visit from our furnace installer. He did some double checking of the wiring diagrams and discovered that either from the factory, or his workers had a wire hooked up in the wrong place. Basically with the wire the way it was, anytime the thermostat was calling for heat it would cause the feed auger to run continously. So, between these two problems being fixed suddenly everything started working perfect.
Some suggestions I can offer
Start with more than the two cups of pellets they recomend. Unless your fire really takes off it will burn out before reaching sufficent temperature to kick the feed system in.
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