Fireplace Maintenance

Steven@147

T&S RV Adventures
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Joined
May 11, 2017
Messages
2,808
Location
Texas
Decided to pull out our fireplace and do a little maintenance on it and inspect the AC plugs and wiring. There were times we have run the fireplace 24x7. It started to smell like dust when we turned it on. Thought you might want to see what it takes to pull it out. Not a big deal at all.
Pull up on the "U" face plate and remove, take out the four screws and pull the fire place out, it's very light weight, I set it on a blanket to not harm the floor. I vacuumed out the unit, it had a lot of dust on it and inside the cabinet.

I unplugged the fireplace power cord and inspected the prongs, no sign of them getting hot. Then inspected the plugin screwed to the floor inside the cabinet, all good. Also inspected the wiring at the back wall, everything looked good. Reinstalled fireplace - Done.
 

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Thanks so much Steve! We used ours last week basically 24/7 and one evening, I wondered what it would take to inspect it. Now I know without having to figure it out.
 
Our fireplace would go into overtemp shutdown. After I pulled it out I looked at the airflow path and saw the only inlet was an oversized hole cut for the power cable. I used a 2" hole saw and cut overlapping holes to make a 3" X 12" opening near the top of the cabinet back. And I realized the pop-up TV has to be up to draw air to the fireplace. I also took the back off the fireplace and put a few drops of oil on the blower bushings.
 
Our fireplace would go into overtemp shutdown. After I pulled it out I looked at the airflow path and saw the only inlet was an oversized hole cut for the power cable. I used a 2" hole saw and cut overlapping holes to make a 3" X 12" opening near the top of the cabinet back. And I realized the pop-up TV has to be up to draw air to the fireplace. I also took the back off the fireplace and put a few drops of oil on the blower bushings.

I found kind of the same thing for air flow. In my second pic you can see the slots cut into the top of the unit, this is where air comes into the unit. We don't have the pop-up TV but, like you the hole where the power cable comes in from the bottom outside of the slide, is oversized and you can actually can see light from the outside underneath the slide. This is really the only place where it can draw outside air from, however I had also modified the radio internal speaker cover that for our coach sets right below the TV, when I was replacing the Jensen and installing a sound bar. The fire place can draw air from this area also and down into the cabinet where the fireplace sets into.
 
So, my electric fireplace has a 2 x 10 inch electric heating element with a blower attached. Everything else on the fireplace is just the pretty stuff. The heating element is small and compact and if the fan doesn’t come on almost immediately, the heating element will overheat and the thermal safety will shut it down and you will get the “88” error. Cycling the breaker for the fireplace resets the alarm. I discovered the fan, after setting all winter, was was being a little slow starting up. I was able to apply some oil on the shaft of the blower right at the bearings. You need to be really careful with the oil because too much and the fan could blow the oil into the heating unit and cause a fire. This seems to have fixed my problem.

BShepherd
 
The fireplace on our new unit had a scratch on the faceplate that someone tried to cover up with Sharpie. That didn't escape DW's eagle eye. GD sent us an entire new unit that I will install once the snow melts and I can get it out of storage to open the slide. The bathroom sink was scratched as well, so they also sent a new one of those. Pretty happy with GD's and the dealer's customer service.

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