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better ignitor
Thursday, February 3 2011
I'll probably get a few emails from people telling me how stupid I am, but I have an admission to make: our household boiler has not been professionally serviced since we took possession of it in October of 2002. That was back before the Iraq war! As with all the other complex devices in our household, I am its fixit man. If it breaks, it's up to me to figure out what is wrong. And our boiler has broken in various ways through the years and I've always been able to fix it. I've also customized both its wiring and the routing of hydronic fluid into and out of it. Problems have never been too severe and could always be fixed by simply replacing a part: here a fuel filter, there a fuel pump, and (last year), a whole boiler control module. But still the boiler has had its problems. One of these is a tendency for it to boil over through its pressure relief valve on a regular basis (since antifreeze is so expensive, I collect all such boil-overs in a bucket to be recycled back into the hydronic network). I've lowered the boiler's maximum temperature, but I cannot eliminate this behavior.
Two of the boiler's problems have seemed related: its occasional incidents of delayed ignition, which would cause a small explosion inside the boiler and puff an acrid cloud of fuel oil smoke into the house. Sometimes the ignition delay would be for such a long period that the boiler would detect it as a fault and shut down, requiring a manual reset. This problem was helped somewhat by the new boiler control module, but that might have only been because it was tolerant of longer ignition delays. So the other day I ordered a replacement for the boiler's ignitor, a large heavy coil wound in such a way that it can covert 120 volts AC into 10,000 volts AC. This is what produces the spark that ignites the oil ærosol. That coil's replacement arrived today. The replacement (made by Beckett) is much smaller and lighter, suggesting it uses solid-state wizardry to achieve what had previously been done through the 19th Century brute-force technology of wire and armature. I was delighted to see that the new ignitor had been made not in China, India, Brazil, or even Germany, but instead Elyria Ohio, a crumbling rust belt hellscape only nine miles from Oberlin, where I attended college. (I've walked and biked back and forth between Elyria and Oberlin numerous times.)> Since installing the new ignitor, the boiler has operated reliably and without any delayed ignition explosions, although I won't be certain that I've fixed the problem until there's been a month of good behavior.
My overmicroprojectmanaged project is winding down finally, with less and less for me to do, allowing me to play around with other projects that catch my fancy. At this time of year, these projects tend to be electronic in nature. I checked back into the Arduino community to see if any advances had been made with getting Arduino to work on an Atmega32, a big microcontroller with plenty of analog and digital I/O ports. I found a page claiming such advances had been made, which might prove useful in a hypothetical upgrade of the solar controller. But when I went to install a supposed Arduino bootloader on my Atmega32 chip, I ran into a number of problems. For starters, it seemed that the last version of the Arduino IDE I'd installed had managed to break my WinAVR environment, which I need for installing software on AVR/Atmega chips outside of Arduino. And then somehow in all the confusion I managed to set the Atmega32's fuse settings in a way that required me to rig up an external clock in order to flash it back correctly. When it comes to Atmega fuse settings, there's a lot more confusion than knowledge; fortunately, though, I managed to find an AVR fuse calculator.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110203 feedback
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