| The American Harvest is rugged and built to withstand the coldest climates with maximum life expectancy. This multifuel heater burns corn, wood pellets, and other fuels such as soy beans, olive pits, cherry pits, bio mass fuel grains, and processed silage. A new Digital Control Board with built-in diagnostics and LED readouts make testing, startup, and operation a breeze with just a touch of a button. |
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 Works great when you use it properly |
| Review Date: April 1, 2006 |
| Reviewer: James, NW Ohio |
I have had my stove for a year now. It cost about $300 to heat my 1600 sq ft basement heated. The additional benifit is that because the heat rises, my floors are warm on the first floor, and the air in the family room which is also the room with the stairs to the basement is warmer.
There are a couple issues that you must take into consideration:
Dry corn is a must. I buy corn from a local farmer with a moisture content of about 14 - 14.5%. This is a little higher than recommended by the manufacturer, so I add 2 lbs. of wood pellets per bushel of corn. I also add about 1/2 lb. of oyster shell (chicken scratch) per bushel to virtually eliminate klinkers.
The stove needs to be clean. I shut the stove down once a week for cleaning. Empty the ash bin, vacuum the firebox area, the heat transfer tubes, and the chimney clean-out.
Noise is about equal to a normal box window fan in good condition. The noise I hear is tha actual air blowing more than anything else. The firebox does lift up and drop back down on occasion, but this happens on average about once every hour or so, less immediately after a cleaning, more after 5 or 6 days of running.
Power. You must have electricity to run. If the power goes out, so does the stove. This will not keep you warm during power outages. We have lost power while the stove was running, but all that happened was the stove went out. No fumes seemed to back up into the house, but I had closed the air intake vent immediately. I would imagine that if you didn't close it, it would smell a bit until the fire died out.
It is much more work than just turning up the thermostat, but I have saved more than half the cost of the stove in propane compared to last winter. I am thinking about purchasing another one for the upper level.
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The stove is good; the manual isn't.
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| Review Date: November 24, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Joseph A. Demko, Bridgeville, PA United States |
The reason many people end up dissatisfied with this stove is poor documentation. The stove really will efficiently burn wood pellets, cherry stones, corn, and other biomass fuels. The problem is that the manual explains virtually nothing about how to adjust the stove to get an efficient burn out of any of these fuels.
The fuel/air mixture is controlled from a digital keypad on the side of the stove. It is rather cryptically labelled with the digits 1-9 and the letters A, B, and C. The manual says that A controls the auger speed which means it controls how fast fuel is fed into the burn chamber. B, it is claimed, controls blower speed. C stops the auger for 90 seconds.
Where we run into problems is that all the default settings, in my experience, have a fuel/air mixture that is too rich. That is to say that there is too much fuel and not enough air. The result is that the stove burns poorly, produces a lot of soot, and doesn't heat well.
If you go to the keypad and simultaneously press and hold the A down arrow and the B up arrow for 5 seconds the display will flash; this means you can adjust base auger speed and base blower speed. This is where the manual really falls down.
Now press A. The LED above A will light and you will see numbers in both the A and B displays. 7 and 7, for example. What the booklet doesn't tell you is that this is basically a decimal display that means 7.7! You can adjust auger speed by tenths all the way from 1 to 9.
Press B and you can do the same thing with blower speed.
The booklet also confuses the blower issue. There are actually two blowers at work. B adjusts the blower that forces air into the burn chamber, not the fan that blows hot air into the area you want heated.
With a clear idea of what the keypad actually does, you should dial auger speed way down and blower speed up. With premium wood pellets I usually have the base auger speed set at around 2 and the base blower speed set at around 8. From there, as you adjust the heat level up and down, you just have to adjust the damper accordingly.
The manual notes that you should add chicken scratch to corn to avoid clinker formation. I've found it's a good idea to add it to any fuel that you are using.
Finally, avoid the temptation to run the stove with the damper too far open. This gives a blow torch look to the flame. You want to avoid it because it promotes clinker formation and because it blows a greater amount of fly ash around the inside of the stove than necessary.
With respect to fuel types: Wood pellets produce the greatest amount of heat and the smallest amount of fly ash. Corn and cherry pits have to be burned in greater volume to keep the house at the correct temperature and they produce greater amounts of ash. This means, in practice, that the stove has to be cleaned less frequently with pellets than with other fuels.
Overall, this stove works very well and would have a better reputation if American Harvest had put any effort whatsoever into producing a manual that explained how the controls function. |
So far so good
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| Review Date: November 21, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Arthur J. Costigan, Rural Pennsylvania |
I've had this stove for about a month now. It produces a nice hot fire. I am heating about 2500 ft sq with it and it's keeping the house at about 65 degrees with an outside temp of about 25. I up the heat setting a night and back it off during the day.
Just one thing to note so far, the out of the box combustion-air settings need to tweaked a bit. I noticed that the default setting at each heat level don't provide enough air. Not a big deal since you can adjust it by manually opening the draft control slightly. Supposedly the electronics can be programmed to do this automatically which I might have the dealer do for me. |
OK stove, terrible customer service.
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| Review Date: January 12, 2009 |
| Reviewer: SJFF, |
I have owned two pellet stoves before ordering this one, a Harmon Accentra and an old Whitfield. The Whitfield worked about as well as the Harmon and I came to realize they all operate on the same principal so I was not concerned about ordering the 6039.
When I went to install the stove I ran into a problem. I could not attach the 'T' fitting to the stove exhaust outlet. The outlet pipe had been jammed so tightly against the stove sheet metal that there was no gap for the 'T' to fit. I called the company at about 4:25 PM and was on hold for 25 minutes. The person I spoke to was rude and unhelpful but, best of all, she hung up on me at 5:00! I decided to just repair it and worry about the warrenty later.
As for the operation of the stove, I have used pellets only and it does pretty well. The fan is no louder than the other stoves I've owned. It does have to be cleaned weekly but all pellet stoves should be cleaned that often. In fact, some of the older stoves had to be cleaned daily. After 2 months I checked the 'T' fitting and it was virtually clean so I'm assuming the burn is efficient.
This stove does not have an auto ignitor which I was not sure would be a problem. My method is to use a propane (MAP gas) torch to lite the pellets, it works great and is fast and clean.
I have had a problem when it runs out of pellets. The stove will show ERR2 and normally you just add more and restart. Lately however it will just keep shutting down. I removed the side panel and jumped out the low temp switch to keep it running and after a few hours it was back to normal.
I would only recommend this stove based on it's price and only if you are confident you can repair it yourself. Customer service is worse than useless. As far as parts, it looks like they used off the shelf motors you could interchange with ones from Grainger to save some money. |
costly repairs
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| Review Date: January 19, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Cammie Holm, |
We've had this make and model and something breaks down on it about every other year. The repairs each time has been a bit over $100. I've had to do the repairs myself and have even had to purchase new a tool that I didn't own just to complete the new instillation of the new part.
I now wish I had not "gone cheap" but spent more money at a local store that has in house repair men and other customer support available beyond a remote phone call.
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