The stove battle

I engaged our Dickinson Lofoten diesel heater again today in our running battle over whether or not it will light and stay lit as designed, and I think I may have scored a hit.

Since we're tied up and steady and I had nothing else going on today I decided to take the damn thing apart yet again to try some new tactics to get it to feed fuel reliably into the burner pan. To recap the problem briefly, what has been happening is that, regardless of the setting, fuel may or may not flow from the tank into the stove. It seems almost random when this occurs; sometimes it won't even flow enough to light in the first place, other times it will light just fine and go out after ten minutes, and others it will go for hours before stopping.

I had suspected that a float mechanism, designed to cut the supply off if too much was in a secondary feeder tank, was the culprit; it seemed redundant to me and unnecessarily complex, and since every way I could test the valve itself seemed to indicate it was working properly, I wanted to remove the float and see what happened.

What happens is that the valve still works properly, but the secondary tank quickly fills up and overflows through an overflow line. So the float had to go back in; but in disassembling it I noticed that the little pin mechanism which works to cut the flow when the float is up had some corrosion at the tip. My current theory is that the corroded bit was sticking in the "closed" position even when the float itself fell open. So, I cleaned off the corrosion as best I could and reassembled the thing.

Unfortunately, all the monkeying around and testing had flooded the burner pan and I didn't dare light it. Apparently the best way to clear it is to take a full roll of toilet paper, which happens to be about the size of the chamber, and dunk it in to absorb the fuel. Well; I'm not one to waste a roll of toilet paper so cavalierly, so I'm just going to let some of it evaporate off until I actually need the thing again, and we'll see what happens then.

Even if it does work, it will probably be a while before I trust it. And the pin is still not in great shape; it could stick again. The best thing to do would be replace it, but I should have figured it out back in Vancouver, where the manufacturer is based--I doubt I'll find a dealer up here. If it continues to be an issue, though, I may try to Dremel up a replacement out of a cotter pin or something.