David Quisenberry swears by his Toyostove. He’s used it to heat his home in Juneau for nearly a decade, with few malfunctions. But during Juneau’s first cold snap of the winter, that changed.
“We had single-digit temperatures, and my stove went out,” he said. “I had my niece staying here. And she called and said there’s a code on it, and the code says it’s not getting any fuel.”
Luckily, Quisenberry had a backup heater to keep the house from freezing up. Still, he was perplexed. The stove, a Toyo Laser 531/532, was nearly new. He’d had it installed in August to replace a larger Toyo he’d relied on for eight winters.
But when the stove repairman arrived, Quinsenberry saw the problem right away.
“He opened the stove up, and there’s a little burner assembly. And the fuel nozzle was all carbon, backed up with black crud,” Quinesberry said.
Toyostoves, from the Japanese brand Toyotami, are a popular heating system across Alaska, especially in rural areas. They burn efficiently on stove oil, heating cabins and houses in places where temperatures regularly drop well below zero.
But stove technicians say Toyo’s mid-sized stoves are failing in cold weather, and there’s no consensus about why it’s happening.
Crashing in colder temperatures
Sam Trivette, another long-time Toyostove owner in Juneau, says he saw the same build-up on the fuel nozzle when his stove died in the mid-December freeze.
“I’ve never seen anything caked up like that before,” he said. “These stoves are so well designed, they burn so cleanly, that to have it malfunction within a month, obviously there’s a problem.”
His stove was also a Laser 531/532, even newer than Quisenberry’s. When the cold weather came, he had an older Toyo 700 series stove running too, using the same fuel.
“The one upstairs that we’ve had for about 11 years stayed functioning fine, when the new one failed,” he said.
Local stove technician Steve Sanders, of S&S Toyo Repair, said he’d never seen a Toyostove that had problems running in the cold.
“I’ve been going for 15 years. I haven’t seen it,” he said. “I’ve seen the build-up, if they use bad fuel. But not new heaters, and not this many at one time.”
In the wake of the cold snap, he found himself scrambling to service around 20 Toyostoves, all in the mid-sized range. He said there were a couple of OM23s — the predecessors to the Laser 530 series — but most were new Laser 531/532s. The two models use most of the same technology.
All had gone out during the same cold weekend, with the same error codes and the same carbon build-up around the fuel nozzle.
Sanders kept a record of each one he repaired.
“All of the photos look the same,” he said. “And you don’t need to be a technician to see that it was something happening with the fuel.”
After the carbon is scrubbed away, the stoves run again. But Sanders says he’s still scratching his head about the root cause.
“I know how to fix it,” he said. “But what caused it, I’m still not exactly sure.”
He thinks it could have been a problem with a bad batch of fuel, but he’s waiting on answers from the state’s sole Toyostove distributor, Rural Energy Enterprises in Anchorage.
Rural Energy told KTOO that any potential fuel studies would be conducted privately.
No clear cause
James Altom, a technician with Arctic Technical Services in Fairbanks, says he believes the problem is not the fuel itself, but the way this model of Toyostove processes it. He says he’s been quietly servicing Laser 531/532 outages in even colder temperatures.
“We’ve been dealing with this for a good two years now. And it’s just, it’s terrible,” he said. “They will shut down. I mean, brand new ones, right out of the box, three months later.”
Altom says that most of the Laser 530 series units they’ve installed malfunction with the same carbon build-up.
“And it really happens when it gets cold. And my boss and I have investigated it. We’ve done tests on it. And we think it has something to do with cold fuel in cold air,” Altom said.
The problem is, they don’t know for sure. Altom says the local technicians don’t have a deep knowledge about the Toyostoves’ manufacturing or programming, which makes it hard to find a long-term solution.
“We contact Rural Energy all the time about it. And they don’t seem to have an answer for it, either,” he said. “And they’re trying to say, ‘Oh, this is only happening in Fairbanks and Barrow. And it doesn’t happen in Anchorage or anywhere else. And I’m like, ‘that’s kind of odd,’” he said.
Like Sanders, Altom says he’s been told the problem is related to fuel supplies, but he’s skeptical. He says he repaired Toyostoves across Fairbanks and Barrow that were serviced by several different fuel companies. The one commonality is the kind of unit.
“It is strictly the 530 series unit that is having the issue,” he said.
Rural Energy told KTOO that they don’t believe there is a widespread issue with any of the Toyostoves they distribute.
What happens when it gets cold again
Sanders, the Juneau repairman, says there’s no long-term solution. But all the repairs were covered under warranty, and he was able to make repairs quickly so no one was left in the cold for long.
Toyostove owners like Quisenberry say that doesn’t give them peace of mind.
“He says ‘don’t worry about it. I’ll come back and fix it.’ And I’m like, well, when it gets cold, that’s when I need my stove to work,” he said. “But jeez. I lived in Fairbanks for a long time. And I know that there’s lots of people up north that use it. So this is … not a joke.”
In Fairbanks, Altom and Arctic Technical Services say that without an explanation for the malfunction, they have few options for responding to unhappy customers. They’ve gone so far as to buy back defunct 530 stoves at a discount and replace them with the larger 700 series. Altom estimates that they’ve lost thousands of dollars in the process.
And he says they’ve tried to steer new customers away from the Laser 531/532 series altogether.
“People that come in to buy them, I really tried to talk them out of it,” he said. “Because until they fix this problem, you know, I don’t like to sell a product that I can’t stand behind.”
