How Do You Keep Your Pellet Stove From Squeaking?

It's cold one or two months early for grandpa this year so we have two stoves going again.  It's mid November!.  I am learning how to use a new wood stove fireplace insert that weighs 450 lbs!  It went in smooth as silk thanks to a hydraulic dolly.  It doesn't put out the heat the old Vermont Defiant did but it is much more attractive in some aspects and a whole lot safer.  The fire is inside the fireplace now and not sitting out in the dining room.

We bought a Magnum Countryside pellet stove after we bought this farm and old historic farmhouse.  We have gotten our good out of it after ten seasons and finding the right pellet and keeping them dry is really important.

Still, the stirrer in the burning pot is squeaking and squawking the day after clean out.  This Greenway oak pellet from Tennessee is one of the best I've found but the pot sounds dry and not lubed enough.  I am trying to figure out how to keep it from squeaking so I am open to any suggestions from my readers.

I think the soot needs to be cleaned off the stirrer when I clean out the stove but I don't know what to do to accomplish that.  A wire brush works pretty well but that is a lot of work a week because it is noisy so often.

I think it needs to be disassembled and cleaned from the flue to the burning pot.  If I had a corn dryer, I would be burning dry shelled corn but my corn is too wet to burn from the bin.  10-12% dry corn burns best and anything higher than that causes even more clinkers in this stove.

It's so windy today it is really too windy to be burning it with gusts up to 50 MPH right directly into the flue pipe.

There is no cheap way to heat but it's been a pretty "green" and cheap stove for us.

Ed Winkle