Premier Stove Mystery

Desert Rat · January 2018

One of my off grid neighbors told me about an odd occurrence that he has noticed with his Premier propane stove. He says when there is a big load on the inverter (refigerator starting surge, microwave, power saw air compressor), he hears one of the spark lighters on the stove clicking for a few seconds. Has anyone experienced this? What could cause this to happen? The inverter is a Schneider Conext 4024.

stillchillin · January 2018

I have a similar problem with my frig w/water and ice in the door. For no apparent reason and with no set pattern the ice will just start shooting out the door, sometimes it is the water. When it was new about eight years ago and in warranty a factory tech came out and replaced every board in the frig, still does it. sometimes it will go months without acting up. I have tried to find a device to clean up the power for this one circuit but have not found anything that I thought would help. Maybe a surge protector would solve the problem. Any ideas? Sorry Rat didn't mean to hijack your thread seems like the same fix for both problems though. Still

Estragon · January 2018

I wonder if it has something to do with harmonics caused by starting the motor load, maybe compounded by a grounding issue?

BB. · January 2018

If your stove uses AC power for the spark ignition, those typically have the neutral (white wire) of the AC power bonded to the green wire safety ground. If the Neutral/Hot wires are ired backwards to the stove, the spark ignition may not detect the flame (this happened on our non-Premier stove--The H+N were reversed). I am not sure it would cause your problem (sparking when stove is off), but it is the first debugging step (measure Neutral and Hot lines to ground--Neutral should be near zero volts AC, the hot should be near 120 VAC.

Regarding Stillchillin, In general, surge protectors are there to stop "gross" surges (hundreds to thousands of volts). Surge protectors generally do not "clean up" noisy power.

Do you have any indication that your inverter's AC output is not stable (lights flickering brighter/dimmer, noisy radio or TV, electronics like clock or such rebooting/losing settings)?

My in-laws had a brand new refrigerator that started behaving badly (eventually would just stop cooling and posting an error on the display). Turned out that that brand/model had a design flaw that caused it to "sweat" inside the refrigerator compartment. The water collected in a little wiring trough in the refrigerator shelving that went to a thermostat probe (in the meat/vegetable drawer). The water shorted the circuit and caused the digital controller lose communications with other sub-processors. Eventually, the whole refrigerator was replaced under warranty (there were fixes to the sweating, which eventually did work), but nobody knew to dry out the wiring tray until the 5th service call or so.

-Bill

Sol4r · February 2018

were you able to resolve this?

Premier Stove Mystery

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