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www.fueloilnews.com | FUEL OIL NEWS | DECEMBER 2016 45 BY GEORGE LANTHIER HVAC/ HYDRONICS IF YOU'VE EVER ATTENDED ANY OF MY gas, oil or wiring classes or schools, you know there are two things we keep beat- ing on. Proper grounding and Lanthier's Second Law, "assume nothing." Well, it turns out they are both very true and sometimes in frustration even I can forget my own decrees. This summer between classes we worked aggressively on some new trainers for those schools and seminars. Almost all of the training units we are building will have a use in gas, oil and wiring-system training, but in some cases there are system controls that are built for just one type of fuel. This article is about one of those trainers, Figure 1. This is a new wiring and operational trainer for an IFC, an integrated furnace controller, Honeywell's ST9200. We also cover this control in one of our books; WIRING Fuel Burning Equipment, Volume 3, which is available on our website. The IFC will run a 120 Vac gas-fired warm air furnace with all the bells and whistles, humidifier, electronic air cleaning and an air conditioner, but it will also provide for ignition and operation of the gas burner through a 24 Vac gas valve and a 120 Vac igniter. We use the trainer shown in Figure 1 with one of the four gas igni- tion cases that we built last year and the seven additional cases we have from Honeywell. Those cases mimic the original Honeywell gas cases, Figure 2. All of these cases allow us to teach larger classes on gas heating. These cases and other trainers allow the students to not only wire up a whole furnace "in a box," but also fire it off and simulate operation of a gas burner and its combustion safety controls. The burner is real and the gas is real, but just a smaller size. These units are aiding us to provide as much hands-on instruction as possible. As I'm finishing the case it comes to the time to fire it off and test my labors. As soon as it tries to start we get an "error message" from the board which is reported through a sequence of flashes from an LED on the board, Figure 3. The message is that a faulty ground is present. So I recheck my wiring, paying close attention to the grounding of my control, burner and system. Everything proves out okay, but we keep getting that error code. You may remember that I con- sider the best servicemen out there to be "lazy servicemen." They've learned through a lot of errors of their own that there are two ways to do our jobs: the hard way and the easy way. And the easy way is always bet- ter. Knowing that the electrical loads are almost always the culprit when it comes to troubleshooting any burner, regardless of fuel type, I refocus on the loads and very quickly isolate each one to find out that each one works alone, just not in conjunction with the board. The case has two 120 Vac muffin fans to simulate the draft inducer and ASSUME NOTHING! Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3