So we burn pellets. Lots of pellets. We installed the pellet stove I’ve been maundering on about something like ten years ago. We have probably consumed somewhere between 50 and 75 tons of wood pellets using the same machine. I know it pretty well by now. In the intervening years, we’ve had to perform the following fixes:

• The slightly bent hinge pin on the shopper-abused combustion chamber door eventually broke off. I brought it to a welder who lives down the street and he welded it back on for a double sawbuck
• I’ve replaced the burn pot twice. They’re made of high-temp steel but they wear out
• I’ve replaced the combustion fan motor twice. All the hot exhaust gas exits through it, and it runs continuously when it’s on
• I’ve replaced the convection fan twice. It sucks air out of the room, passes it over the heat exchanger, and blows it back out into the room at 200CFM (cubic feet per minute). They never quit, they just get noisy
• I’ve replaced thermodiscs several times. They’re small, rudimentary switches that open and close when temperatures change
• I tried to replace the auger motor. It was broke. I bought a new one. We shivered while we waited for it to arrive. The new one arrived broken. I got tired of waiting and took the old one apart and fixed it. I got a full refund on the busted one
• There’s a rope gasket seal on the combustion chamber door. I’ve replaced that twice, maybe three times
• There are gaskets on the cleanout panels on the sides of the heat exchanger. I’ve replaced them umpty-nine times. I started buying sheets of automotive gasket material and making my own to save dough
• I replace the igniter, which works like a cigarette lighter in a car used to, back when people smoked and fumbled with cigarette packs in their cars when they wanted to crash into things, instead of texting like they do now.

All that together cost about a thousand dollars, spread out over ten years, and required only a Phillips head screwdriver or a single nut driver to make the repairs. You can judge if that’s a lot of money or not. We produced maybe 800,000,000 BTUs with the thing, and needed every one.

I’ll tell you right now that the machine didn’t work right out of the gate. After we fixed the hopper switch, it functioned, but it didn’t work. Anyone who’s been in the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Massachusetts knows what I mean when I say, “It functions, but it doesn’t work.” There was a minor design flaw in the machine that would have been vanishingly easy for the maker to fix, but they never bothered to try. The burn pot is too shallow.

Pellets roll down a chute and hit the bottom of the OEM burn pot and bounce out. These pellets smolder in the ash dump because it’s hot in there, and they cause all kinds of problems. The greasy soot they produce coats everything with an impenetrable dusty carapace. The flame sensors malfunction because the soot acts as an insulator, and they can’t sense the flame when they’re coated with it. The viewing window turns black in an hour or two. The flue pipes get positively furry inside, when they’re not full blocked, I mean. And when you turned off the stove to clean it, you could never wait long enough for the smoldering pellets to go out. The house would go cold, and when you couldn’t stand it any more, no matter how long you waited, you’d open the door to clean it out and your house would fill with smoke anyway. And the smoldering pellets set my shop vac on fire once. I appreciate free heat as much as the next guy, but the burning plastic smell took some of the enjoyment out of it.

The Vogelzang VG 5790 isn’t supposed to be used as the sole heating device in your home. The manufacturer puts that right out front, so you’ll understand that it’s not reliable, and don’t come crying to them if you’re cold and don’t have another heater. But you can use it for your only heat source. We did. We had to. We suffered along with it for a while. I put up a shield wall of broken refractory bricks salvaged from the wood burning furnace around the burn pot, and that helped a bit. Then I found a guy making an aftermarket shield made of high-temp steel that you stuck on top of the burn pot to nearly double its height.

That was all it took. Every problem disappeared. We poured in pellets, cleaned it out once a week, and wondered just how dumb the manufacturer could be to piss off countless customers instead of fixing the problem. You have to understand customer service a little to figure out why.

You see, customer service is considered a cost to someone who went to Wharton. It can’t be anything else. The only way (for him) to get a bonus is to cut costs. So you put the girl who couldn’t work the coffee machine properly at the pellet stove warehouse in charge of answering customer complaints. She works part time. They give her a script to read. The enraged customer calls, and between their chattering teeth they explain their problem. The girl dutifully looks it up, and asks, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” She’s not the curious sort, or she’d begin to wonder why there are seventeen pages in her script, and the reply to every question is, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

This is usually followed by a lot of yelling from the customer, and, “I’m sorry we must have a bad connection. I can’t hear you. Please call back.” Then she goes to lunch, which lasts until Monday next. If you call back enough, they’ll eventually send you a new circuit board. The problem is never, ever, your circuit board, but it takes two weeks for you to receive it, and another week to figure out how to install it, and then another week on hold listening to Paul Anka sing Smells Like Teen Spirit until you get the same girl again, who asks you, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” A month of peace is worth a circuit board to them, I guess.

Fixing the problem would have been so much easier than making spittle-flecked customers listen to Paul Anka for hours, but fixing the problem would have been another cost. Wharton don’t play dat, homie. You can’t fire the girl who answers the phone, because you still need a customer service line, even if no one calls. She’s cheaper than an Indian call center anyway, and she’s already on the payroll. So it’s:

Hello, hello, hello hello…

[To be continued]