Great success! I love this thing. My wife is laughing at me because she says I am like a child with a toy, checking the temps constantly and getting giddy when it works properly.
Thank you PapaTango, it is so helpful to hear what your boiler is doing. Great to know your reaction chamber temps get down around water temps too, I was thinking that was a problem but I guess its is not. Again, your experience is invaluable re-assurance that things are working properly. I'm sure once the weather gets colder and demand goes up these "idle problems" (lol) will subside.
I discovered that I had inadvertently upped the temperature delta from 10 to 12 degrees, so I moved it back to 10. Now the boiler kicks on at 175 and not 173. 185 setpoint, so that and the delta are factory settings.
I upped the pulse of air from 50 secs to 75 secs, and left the pulse frequency at 15 minutes.
To build better coals, I ran the heat demand hard during the day yesterday and then stopped it about 4:30pm. At 6:30 I opened the firebox, spread the coals evenly, and loaded more wood. Temps stayed hotter and I could tell the coals were better than before. Still, by 9:30pm the reaction chamber temps were getting down to 198, then up to 210 after a pulse. That seems ideal if it would keep doing that all night. But it slowly dropped lower and lower.
This morning I was sure the fire was out again, RC temp was in the mid-170s along with the water and the RC even dropped a couple of degrees when it first kicked on the blower. But there must have been coals because it fired all the way and heated the water back up without intervention.
So the slight increase in coal amount and quality, combined with a 75 sec pulse every 15 minutes did the trick (at least this time). The boiler stayed idle for over 12 hours and then fired right back to full temp, water from 172.5 to 185 in about 11 minutes. With no demand, the water temp keeps climbing too. Currently at 191.4.
I'm gonna turn on the demand again and let the temp come back down, then power off firestar and to the first cleaning of the reaction chamber, scrape the firebox, air holes, and door, check the chimney, and clean the heat exchangers. Wonder if I'm forgetting anything. Seems to soon to check the solenoid elbow, only been burning for 4 days. Any maintenance suggestions now that it's a few days broken in?
Firestar XP was a bit of a pain to install because my dealer did not steer me just right on a couple of things (he had only installed it once awhile ago and could not remember what wire gauge to use, how to provide power, really anything about it). He told me to use Cat5 in the ditch, that's all I would need (not entirely true). I made the Cat5 work by pairing the individual wires into groups. Really you just need some normal stranded black/white wire, 14-18 gauge will probably do. The knockout on the air box that CB provides is too small for the grommet, boring it out without making a mess was a PITA. ("I paid how much $ to be doing THIS?") But all in all it wasn't too bad. Luckily inside the house I was near the service panel and was able to cut into my OWB electrical circuit and splice a power supply for Firestar XP. Now that it is up and running though I am very glad I have it. Love being able to see exactly what had happened overnight, during burns, during idle/pulse, etc. More information to geek out on.
I'm sure you can tell how I like more info from how long-winded I am, sorry about that BTW! Thanks for sticking with me.