Carlin Ignitors bad

Carl Squatrito

Thanks for the heads up on 5-30-06 1-19-03 still haunts me they are past warranty know.

Dave_4

Carlin Ignitors gone bad

What is it with Carlin Ignitors? Anyone else out there having problems with Carlin Ignitors? My company put in tons of Carlin Ignitors over the years. Nothing but problems with them. I seen 15 gone bad still under warrenty in the last 3 weeks. I tested them all myself to see if any were still good only found 1 so thats 14 in 3 weeks. Now we went to OEM beckett and the problem is gone! Most of the bad ones had a date code of 5/30/06 a few years back it was 1/19/03 I can't tell you how many there was of them just that is was alot!

Mike L

carlin ignitors

yea I agree,the first thing I do when I go to a lockout aand the cause is not obvious is pull out my ohm meter and check the ignitor,if its close it's outta there.That said I don't think the percentage is much higher than the old transformers,and I believe there are enough benefits to continue useing them.As for the Beckett ignitors,I don't know--I know that the circuitry is different but I'm not comfortable with the shorter or seemingly weaker spark.

Leo

I wasn't

I wasn't comfortable with the smaller spark on a Beckett but we went to them because of the lack of dependability on Carlin's. No more ignitor related call backs. Too bad because we still have Carlins from the 90's running strong.

Leo

Ken D.

Carlin

We put a fair amount of Carlin burners and have not seen the problem. Yet.

Norm Harvey

How are you testing the igniters?


From Carlin:

The most difinitiver test is to set the terminals at one-half inch then wire your multimeter set on miliamps between the primary control and the igniter (disconnecting the motor lead) and run the igniter for 5 minutes.

If your meter drops below 300 miliamps at any time, the igniter is bad.


That being said, I agree with you, though I have seen the same problem with the becket igniter also.

How do I fix the problem? I replace the primary to a Carlin 40200, 60200, or a Beckett 7184. The igniter say "constant duty" on them, but it seems they really need to be use only for ignition.

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GaryDidier

carlins

I have had many of these go bad,also almost all of the first series electronic relays (blue box 60000 series). The lower voltage (allison) ignitors seem to hold up better.
Gary from Granville

Saggs

I was at a seminar a while back with the "Firedragon" and he mentioned the imporatance of making sure one of the two self tapping mounting screws that screw into the ignitor were properly "biting" into the metal base plate to insure good grounding. Seems that alot of the screws were not chewing down thru the paint to achieve a good metal to metal contact with the metal ring in the ignitor mounting hole and the baseplate. Supposedly a poor ground shortens the life? Just my 2.5 cents......

Norm Harvey

Thats an interesting perspective. I wonder how grounded the entire unit needs to be. Most boilers that I see in the field are not grounded with a ground wire to mother earth. Can anyone elaborate on that theory?

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Dave_4

Carlin Ignitors

The company I work for experienced a high volume of repeat service calls on the same units, 5 or more per unit, one the things these calls had in common was, a no heat call and it had always been reset by the customer before the tech arrived.
The other thing these calls had in common was Honeywell 8184G primary controls. The light started to come on when I was called back within an hour to a place where everything that causes a burner to fire was thoroughly tested and tested ok, I went back and unit was in reset mode, in talking to the customer, it came out that his wife had taken a long shower, (boiler had a coil), and shortly after she finished, the boiler tried to come on and failed. I replaced the ignitor and have not been back. The story here seems to be that the 8184G requires the ignitor to run the whole time the burner is running and apparently something is overheating or failing during a long run and then operates ok after a down period. We had 8 units that fell into this category. After replacing ignitor never been back. Oh yeah, one other little thing from Carlin, is the 60200-02 control Rev. A and Rev B are nothing but trouble. Rev. C seems to be ok. The Rev code is in lower right corner of the info tag on the control. A little story here too, had an account that had 2 call backs, and on a hunch looked at the control, it was Rev. B ( Rev.B is susceptible to electronic interference, door openers, remote controls, even microwave ovens.) I asked the customer what had changed, new TV? new Stereo? New Microwave, no to all of these, then with a glance at each other, they both said, we just hooked up and installed a whole house internet router, and it is really powerful. Changed control to Rev. C. Have not been back. - Bill

Big Bob_2

We gave up on the Carlin ignitors and controls, we now use an R7184 from Beckett and also beckets ignitors we seem to have better results