Well it seems that my origional assessment was correct except for different reasons. The pellet stove went down again and I was unable to revive it. The repair guy can't get here until this Friday so we have a radiant heater running. I'm thinking it's not quite as drastic as the control board needing replacing but could be. I'm thinking one of the thermal switches went out which is much cheaper. This based on some troubleshooting I did already.
Money has been tight for a few days while we waited for 5 expense checks to arrive. I turn in one every week and usually get at least one a week. This made working on the fence limiting among other things.
Anyway, as the weather is starting to cool down a bit we decided to fire up the pellet stove. It came on for a while and then went off as it usually does so problems weren't noticed...until we needed it again.
I discovered the feed auger wasn't turning and usually that is because of stuff hiding the flame from a photo-electric eye. I checked everything and tried a few things to bypass security systems to get it going temporarily if we needed parts by the time the check came. Nothing worked so we hauled out the electric radiant heater and resolved to just call the dealer after the big check came.
Yesterday while I was driving down the road, I got to thinking that I forgot to check the connection for the wall thermostat. Well, it turned out that I forgot we had by-passed that feature last year. All it took was a little fiddling with the connection and the stove was working again.
The whole project could have cost $75 easily and possibly more by the time the repair guy got done. And of course I was the little womans' hero for 5 minutes.