Coal-Trol to Control Oil Furnace Circulating Fan

My Coal-trol unit as a connection to control the convection fans on the coal stove. I believe they control the Speed of the fans. I will be using the oil furnace blower to circulate the coal stoves heat.

My oil fired furnace blower has a 4 wire motor
Hi
Med Hi
Med Lo
Low

If that motor doesn't blow the fuse on the coaltrol, the coaltrol side should be ok.
I would think my first try would be the Med Hi wire for the max speed, and let the coaltrol slow (and Silence) the fan unit when the day is warmer.

My question, is will the oil furnace motor be ok with the running slower than expected.

Thank you
Don

Hi X,
you should post this question with Automation Correct, thru their site or on the forum site.
Jerry

I just went to the Coal-Trol site, which lead me back to another Topic in this forum. I must never have scroll down on the Index page!
If necessary I will cross post, if I haven't figured it out and pvolcko hasn't responded to this thread.

Additional info on my oil furnace, it is a 1/2 horsepower. And the furnace documentation has a footnote that the model is air conditioning ready. I have no idea How Ready that means. Jerry (leisureline) told me on the phone yesterday that "air conditioning ready" might make a difference on how the fan could be wired.

I will be re-reading the oil furnace documentation over and over to see if I see the best solution. And hoping someone here can point me to a diagram for this specific application.

Thank you
Don

Edit: Thread Moved to Coal-Trol while I was typing.

Xackley,

We've read this and we're thinking it over. We'll have something for you by the end of tomorrow (Monday).

If you can get the amp rating off the motor's info plate that would help a lot, otherwise we have to make some guesstimates. There are a couple of answers, but the amp rating is what will determine which will work for you.

Documentation states

Motor Full Load Amps : 8.7

I am assuming they are talking about the 1/2 hp blower motor. The furnace is wired to 120 volts

The documentation says the default speed for the furnace is med hi.

Blower size 10x10

CFM air delivery External static pressure inches of water column

There are 4 more columns for 0.5, 0.4, 0.3, 0.2

0.5
--------------
hi 1500
med hi 1375
mde lo 1230
lo 1040

0.2
---------------------
hi 1705
med hi1530
med lo 1300
lo 1090

I hope that is more than you need to know

Thank you
Don

Xackley,

Sorry for the late reply, had a long day of traveling yesterday and didn't get onto the computer until just now.

8.7 amps is over the rating of the convection blower circuit. The entire module is only rated for 10 amps.

There are two options:
1) Give us a call and we'll see about getting you set up with a unit that has our external/aux fan switch on it. This option allows you to wire to the control board of you furnace and control the fan that way. It works in parallel with your existing furnace setup, meaning you do not need to disconnect the motor from it or disconnect your furnace's thermostat. This is what we recommend for those wanting to control furnace's blower.

2) You can try wiring the blower to its minimum speed. Preferably you'll be able to test the current draw with a multimeter before connecting it to the coal-trol power module. If it is below 3 amps draw it should be okay.

In either case please feel free to call us at 315-299-3589 to discuss this further.

Thanks for the info.

I was also concerned about overheating the oil furnace fan motor by running it too slow when varying the speed with the coal-trol unit, so I think for the initial set up I am going to:

1:completely shut down the oil furnace while the coal stove is operating.
2:install a limit switch to sense the temp of coal stove, and simply turn the furnace blower off and on.

That will give me a baseline of temps and speeds in an electronically simple setup. Once I know the speeds and air flow necessary to keep the house and equipment comfortable, I will revisit controling the air speed with the coal-trol.

I will keep you informed of what is happening, if I change the wiring from what I described, above.

Thank you
Don

Sounds like a good plan. Good luck.

about a month ago, I settled on using the limit switch for running the oil fired furnaces fan. On the Lo wire the amperage is 3.7, Med Lo is 4.4, on a Split Capacitor motor. The Coal Trol did an excellent job both on Lo and Med Lo of controlling the circulation, with out the Controller unit on the Stove becoming more than luke warm (maybe 100* at most).
The problem was that the motor was stalled once when the FR was around 15. As you know, this is the worst case scenario for a motor. I couldn't think of a fail-safe method to get the motor to Start it's spin at very low speeds.
When I jump started the motor with full current for a second or two, the motor would work fine even when the FR was at 10%.
The only workable option would be if the Coal-Trol would go to full speed on the convection circuit for 2 or 3 seconds when the FR turns the motor on when increasing the FR.

Again, thanks for your help.

Question: Will there be a Version 3, and what features and improvements are planned.

A 5 second full speed "bump" whenever the convection motor turns on has been a feature of the new software for several months now. There is also the ability to set the minimum speed the fan will run at and the feedrate threshold at which the fan will first kick on. There are a number of other features too. As we get closer to releasing it we'll be making an announcement with a full feature list, price changes, and announcement of official thermostat software update and upgrade services and the prices of those services.

Can we do the firmware upgrade on our computer as we do with other network hardware?

I do hope the better control feature are available on the standard model.

The Plus + model is scary.
"4 Weekday and 4 Weekend setpoints (Morning, Day, Evening, and Night), times and temperatures user programmable"

That would be a lot of button pushing.

2 setpoints is plenty. any more would be an irritation. Do those extra setpoint have a "disabled" setting, so they could be ignored.

The updates will have to be done at our shop. We anticipate those who want it will do it during the down season(s). The RJ45 jacks we use may be the same jacks used for ethernet, but the devices can not be plugged into a network.

As for the extra setpoints on the TS1 thermostats: We use a different menu arrangement on them so that you do not need to go through all 8 setpoints. Instead, you select the weekday or weekend setpoints group, then you move through the 4 setpoints in that group only. Makes it less bothersome than if they were all sitting there on the main menu, like on the TS2, and this arrangement allows us to indicate which group a setpoint belongs to given the limited number of characters on the display.