Installed in December to replace an old Enviro. (Having regrets)
1. We need this to run in power outages with a battery/solar, with the enviro we could unplug the ignition thingy, then manually start it and it would adjust hi/low flame with thermostat and never go out.
There is no “always on” type option with this stove, so it’s gonna cycle off every time the room gets to temperature. How can i overcome this???
2. The lever to open the trap door under the ash pan is VERY hard for an older person to operate. It is a piece of metal with no knob, that requires high level of 1 or 2 finger strength to pull and twist. It is also located way at the bottom of the unit requiring a low bend. The older person in our house who needs stove most just had knee surgery and bending to 4” off the ground is not practical. Many “able bodied” people have more disability than this. So one small injury or operation and the stove can’t be cleaned???
3. That lever was ENTIRELY stuck after a few weeks of operation. I found that just a slight buildup of black deposit (about 1mm) was the cause and i had to bang and chisel it down. The stove had arrived missing it’s scraper so person described above had been cleaning daily with a screw driver. We now have the scraper tool but it wasn’t much of a match for that black stuff without chiseling at it to get it down to under 1mm
4. The two slider trap doors inside the fire box either side of the burn pot: one slides smoothly (R), the other constantly jams (L) and won’t pull out. I was able to pull it out and push it in with brute force, but that’s not necessary in the other side, and as per 2 above requires 1-2 finger strength to pull a sharp ish piece of metal. What’s wrong with it??
5. Should it have come with some kind of little brush to brush the firebox ash into those trap doors? We’ve repurposed a food grade kitchen basting brush, but at $3.5k they couldn’t throw in a brush to sweep ash? Or was that missing from our delivery too?
6. The weather is very mild right now. The enviro (which was getting quite inefficient in its old age) would have IMHO been a bag every 3 days at the moment. Sante Fe doing bag in <2 days.
Fixed but spectacularly annoying;
7. in the first week of operation it stopped working; the supplier came out and found that the tin label supposedly attached inside the hopper lid that said something like “pellets will not drop of lid is open”, had FALLEN INTO THE PELLETS AND JAMMED IN THE AUGER.
They extracted it and we have the mangled sign as a Souvineer (see attached)
8. The stove came with a horrible off brand thermostat with an unintelligible manual, probably originally written in ancient Aramaic, then translated to Greek, then to English using google translate or something. It did not match the thermostat instructions in the User Manual, which was how i knew to sent it back
We complained and JUST received the replacement. Which is barely OK. Quadra Fire never bothered to even proof the instructions which are full of bad grammar and typos on a photocopied black and white sheet. The COPY button, (which i had fully expected would copy day settings to other days so i wouldn’t have to set 4 period individually for all 7 days) has zero instructions in the manual (other than to say how to use it to get to setup and it will “copy items from option to another” sic).
(Quadra Fire… if you are reading this; for a mere $3990 i will proof and edit the thermostat instructions so future customers don’t have to roll their eyes and wonder if the CEO is illiterate - i mean some of the typos would have been fixed if he’d just glanced over it in his limo on the way to his private jet prior to print… to be fair Enviro manual has needed a rewrite for a decade too).
1. We need this to run in power outages with a battery/solar, with the enviro we could unplug the ignition thingy, then manually start it and it would adjust hi/low flame with thermostat and never go out.
There is no “always on” type option with this stove, so it’s gonna cycle off every time the room gets to temperature. How can i overcome this???
2. The lever to open the trap door under the ash pan is VERY hard for an older person to operate. It is a piece of metal with no knob, that requires high level of 1 or 2 finger strength to pull and twist. It is also located way at the bottom of the unit requiring a low bend. The older person in our house who needs stove most just had knee surgery and bending to 4” off the ground is not practical. Many “able bodied” people have more disability than this. So one small injury or operation and the stove can’t be cleaned???
3. That lever was ENTIRELY stuck after a few weeks of operation. I found that just a slight buildup of black deposit (about 1mm) was the cause and i had to bang and chisel it down. The stove had arrived missing it’s scraper so person described above had been cleaning daily with a screw driver. We now have the scraper tool but it wasn’t much of a match for that black stuff without chiseling at it to get it down to under 1mm
4. The two slider trap doors inside the fire box either side of the burn pot: one slides smoothly (R), the other constantly jams (L) and won’t pull out. I was able to pull it out and push it in with brute force, but that’s not necessary in the other side, and as per 2 above requires 1-2 finger strength to pull a sharp ish piece of metal. What’s wrong with it??
5. Should it have come with some kind of little brush to brush the firebox ash into those trap doors? We’ve repurposed a food grade kitchen basting brush, but at $3.5k they couldn’t throw in a brush to sweep ash? Or was that missing from our delivery too?
6. The weather is very mild right now. The enviro (which was getting quite inefficient in its old age) would have IMHO been a bag every 3 days at the moment. Sante Fe doing bag in <2 days.
Fixed but spectacularly annoying;
7. in the first week of operation it stopped working; the supplier came out and found that the tin label supposedly attached inside the hopper lid that said something like “pellets will not drop of lid is open”, had FALLEN INTO THE PELLETS AND JAMMED IN THE AUGER.
They extracted it and we have the mangled sign as a Souvineer (see attached)
8. The stove came with a horrible off brand thermostat with an unintelligible manual, probably originally written in ancient Aramaic, then translated to Greek, then to English using google translate or something. It did not match the thermostat instructions in the User Manual, which was how i knew to sent it back
We complained and JUST received the replacement. Which is barely OK. Quadra Fire never bothered to even proof the instructions which are full of bad grammar and typos on a photocopied black and white sheet. The COPY button, (which i had fully expected would copy day settings to other days so i wouldn’t have to set 4 period individually for all 7 days) has zero instructions in the manual (other than to say how to use it to get to setup and it will “copy items from option to another” sic).
(Quadra Fire… if you are reading this; for a mere $3990 i will proof and edit the thermostat instructions so future customers don’t have to roll their eyes and wonder if the CEO is illiterate - i mean some of the typos would have been fixed if he’d just glanced over it in his limo on the way to his private jet prior to print… to be fair Enviro manual has needed a rewrite for a decade too).
