carlin EZ Gas seems spark is grounding through electrode insulation

archibald tuttle

got an ez gas that stopped lighting. checked that gas valve is opening for sure so i pulled out the electrode and flame rod assembly and dogged it down to one of the cover screws to get a visual test. once the control gets past the purge and sends high voltage to the sparking electrode i get a small blue halo between the insulation and the clamp. nothing from the uninsulated tip to anything. i'm assuming that this is failure of the electrode insulation although i can't see any fault in the ceramic. i'm digging around for another one but thought i'd check for those who may have experienced this . . . ? the manual doesn't even list bad or grounded electrode as a possible cause for not lighting . . .

nor does it indicate whether the norm is that spark should jump from the electrode connected to the transformer to the second electrode which i think is wired to serve as flamerod but from carbon mark appears to be the recipient of the spark.

thanks for any feedback for those who aren't in the middle of their own polar vortex service headaches.

brian

archibald tuttle

in the answering one's own questions department, found the bit about electrode adjustment in the carlin manual. its just not in the troubleshooting part. it needed a little help although yours truly screwed it up worse the first time i had it out cause it went back in wrong adjusted and butted right against the distribution plate so i actually had weak spark and then i had none.

thank god i piped the union in the right place to allow me to use the swing door on this weil mclain to be used to check the business end without dismembering the burner from the boiler. they really need better modularity if they anticpate you are going to pull the burner every year (which is the maintenance rec. . . you guys are all up on that right . . . )

but, after that, still no luck. it boiled down to, after i tried every frigging thing, switching transforming etc., adjusting the electrodes just right, checking gas valve release, that it had too much air, which gets me to wondering whether you can get loads of propane that are distinctly different in btu content. now just to make matters more fun i was running on a manifold of grill tanks because we got SS Slow Propane company that needed 10 days to fill an order ("7 working days" don't know when it went to that, used to be "5 working days" which i can handle, that means call one week get it the next).

But thing ran like we the people the first set of tanks through. see photo below, but then i went and got tanks refilled. maybe the stuff at the bottom or top of the master tank isn't as rich. the air was must blowing the flame out before it was established. i throttled the air and right back to fine after all that messin' around. i guess the moral of that story is try the simply stuff first.

then i got a delivery today and went back on the 1000 gallon grill tank, put the combustion meter on it and had to open the air notably further than even before, making me wonder if the gas i got is really the same, or if my regulators are kinda sticky or both.

ah, well. alls well that ends well, how was your polar vortex?

brian

Jim Hankinson

With the grill tank manifold you probably didn't have enough vaporization surface so the flow rate to the burner was less that that delivered from the large tank. Therefore, since you had less gas supply you had to reduce the air to match.

archibald tuttle

jim, i would have suspected that but ran a threesome the night before with nary a problem. when i switched to new full tanks is when i had the problem. i added a fourth tank and that was no better. now maybe something happened to the regulator, or maybe i was wrong that i had the tanks inside long enough to stabilize the propane in them at 50 to 60 degrees.

next time i'm going to have a capped tee for a manometer and an infrared themostate to hand so i can figure out what the eff is going on.

the temperature of the tanks might have been a little cooler the second day but they were out of the weather and we're talking maybe 10 or 20 degrees cooler on a guess so i would have thought if i were right on the border vaporizationwise that adding a fourth tank to the manifold would have solved it since it ran fine on 3 the night before.

of course they were outdoor temperature when i bought the propane, but i deliberately got them filled 24 hours before i needed them and brought them and set them on warm floor that i was running with the first three tanks to bring them up to a better temp for vaporization.

perplexed in exeter

PS and that doesn't really explain why my setting would have changed so much from the original when i refilled my thousand gallon tank. it needed about 20% greater air opening than it was set to previously. i had checked the combustion myself on that set with the same meter and the boiler was clean as a whistle, no soot, just a hair of sulfur deposti once i refilled my thousand gallon tank. gotta have simple tees for manometers upstream and down on this stuff i can see.