At Home In The Woods

[srs]

Today I moved some firewood into the garage with optimism that we'll get the fireplace issues worked out.

Keep an eye out on the firewood as they might be infested with ants. I remember moving wood into our living room years ago from outside to the warm living room. Ants must have thought it was spring time and they started to appear everywhere.

 

[Obed]

Obed,
They have the manual for that stove online, it shows a lot
of detail about the outside air control, and it's ACC (automatic)
control. At first glance the outside air control looks like it
might be needed to be turned to the left for "open" and
to the right for "close". It states for operation, to open
outside air, and only close down when not in use.

Is that consistent with what you have tried?
here's their page on the ACC for anybody that
wants to follow, it does look a little complicated.

There are two levers related to the ACC control, one for setting how much air from the room enters the fireplace for combustion and one for a timer that allows more combustion air initially but chokes eventually down the air. I'm not certain that the ACC control and the timer levers are working correctly; it could be we just don't understand them.

According to the manual that came with our fireplace, it appears that the outside combustion air damper is open when the control is pointed to the right and is closed when pointed to the left. That's opposite what you indicated. We'll need to verify.

Thanks,
Obed

 

[Dishpointer]

Sounds like you need to build another fire and test out all possibilities.

 

[Obed]

The wetness of the wood may be part of the issue but probably not the whole problem. The wood was stacked for over a year and wasn't sitting directly on the ground. However, it was uncovered until a month ago. However, with the fireplace doors open, the fire immediately flamed up and would burn hot until we closed the doors. So I'm pretty convinced we have a combustion air supply problem.

My wife bought from the grocery store a very small and expensive bag of dry firewood that we can use to test burning dry wood in the fireplace.

 

[Obed]

It looks like a nice new wheelbarrow instead of my concrete and dirt encrusted rusty one.

CurlyDave,
Unfortunately, the wheelbarrow was buried inside the storage trailer and inaccessable when I most needed it while were were building the house. I can't tell you the number of times I was digging that I thought about that wheelbarrow and wished I could use it. That's why it looks so clean.

Obed

 

[Obed]

Keep an eye out on the firewood as they might be infested with ants. I remember moving wood into our living room years ago from outside to the warm living room. Ants must have thought it was spring time and they started to appear everywhere.

I hate ants. It seems that I've had issues with ants every place I've been for the last 20 years including houses and campers. Quickly putting out poison has been a necessary defense but I sure hate spraying poison around. Now that we have a baby crawling all over the floor, I especially am hesitant to put poison inside the house. Did I mention that I hate ants?

Obed

 

[Dutch445]

i think I looked at the picture and read it wrong,
when i saw
"open/close" knob
i thought it meant OPEN was on the left, and CLOSE
was on the right, but looking at their diagram,
you got it right,
turn to the Right for OPEN,

but is there a way to verify you have
air with it open?

 

[WBWI]

On my 7100 I slide the ACC control to the right as far as it will go, it is spring loaded at the extreme position which activates the timer feature. I was instructed by the installer to burn a wad of paper before lighting the general fire in order to warm the chimney and help create a draft. I can certainly attest to the effectiveness of cracking the doors to add air. It really gets the fire burning hot. I don't mess with the lever on the bottom right side of the unit often, IIRC that opens/closes a damper that controls where fresh air is pulled in (i.e inside air or air from the intake hoses)
I hope you get the issues resolved. You will enjoy the fireplace. Did you get the optional screen that allows you to burn with the doors open?

I don't know if you are on facebook but quadrafire has a page and has been fairly responsive in answering user questions.

 

[patrick_g]

RadarTech,
The topic fits in nicely to where our project is. Our house now has between 2 and 3 degrees difference between one end of the house and the other. The people we've talked to won't really say how many degrees difference between the rooms is acceptable. We can tell just by walking in the rooms that the bedrooms are a little cooler than the kitchen, LV, and DR that are on the other end of the house.

After talking to a GC friend of my and two HVAC companies, I am learning that balancing the HVAC system in a house can be tricky and that 2 or 3 degrees temperature variance may not be that big of a deal. My GC friend said that to really do it right takes hours. The damper in one of the bedrooms is wide open so we can't increase flow to the bedrooms. The GC said we should be able to tweak our house ourselves by closing the dampers in the warm parts of the house ever so slightly, wait a few hours, take temp measurements, tweak the dampers some more, take temp measurements, etc. until we get the temps just right. We might do that.

Obed

And then when the wind blows stronger from a different direction or the low angle sun comes booming into a room instead of like on the overcast day first measurements were taken... then all your careful equalization goes to hades in a hand-basket.

I have three separate heat pumps and each has multiple zones. It cost more to install, has required some maint (a zone damper actuator was sticky and another died), but it sure is comfortable and we don't have to heat unused parts of the house (large house... two people... three floors (ground, upstairs, and basement) and some of the spaces go a while without being occupied much. I think in the long run being able to save by not heating or cooling the whole thing all the time will pay for the added cost of the extra complication. Meanwhile it is amazingly comfortable and my heating and cooling bills are typically less than a few friends with half or less the house to condition.

Pat

 

[Obed]

On my 7100 I slide the ACC control to the right as far as it will go, it is spring loaded at the extreme position which activates the timer feature. I was instructed by the installer to burn a wad of paper before lighting the general fire in order to warm the chimney and help create a draft. I can certainly attest to the effectiveness of cracking the doors to add air. It really gets the fire burning hot. I don't mess with the lever on the bottom right side of the unit often, IIRC that opens/closes a damper that controls where fresh air is pulled in (i.e inside air or air from the intake hoses)
I hope you get the issues resolved. You will enjoy the fireplace. Did you get the optional screen that allows you to burn with the doors open?

I don't know if you are on facebook but quadrafire has a page and has been fairly responsive in answering user questions.

WBI,
Does your Quadrafire 7100 have a timer lever? I have attached pictures of the ACC (Automatic Combustion Control) control and timer lever on our fireplace. The round knob is the ACC control and the lever to the right of the ACC control is the timer lever.

Our manual says to slide the ACC control to the right until it meets resistance, then slide it all the way to the right another 3/4". Well, the ACC knob doesn't get resistance until it hits the timer lever. The manual that describes using the ACC control says nothing about the timer lever so I wonder if the older models did not have a lever for the timer. I'm wondering if the manual hasn't been updated to discuss the timer lever.

My wife looked at the ducting that runs to the fireplace in the basement under the main floor subfloor. It appears that the fireplace installer may have erroneously swapped the connections where two ducts that connect to the fireplace . It appears that the duct that runs from the outside of the house that is supposed to supply combustion air may be connected to the cutout used for recirculating heated air through the house. I looks like the duct that runs from the office/dining room for recirculating heated air may be hooked to the combustion air cutout in the fireplace. The flexible ducts run up through the floor and inside of the sheetrook beside the fireplace so we can't see exactly where each of the two ducts connects to the side of the fireplace. However, it appears they might be swapped.

The flexible duct that runs parallel to the white PVC drain pipe is the combustion air duct. Just to the right of the combustion air duct, you can see the recirculating air duct that runs to the office. Based on the pictures in the installation manual, we think these two ducts run up through the floor into the wrong holes. Thus, the combustion air is trying to come through the long duct running to the office. That duct is probably too long to supply the combustion air. The longer duct can feed recirculating air because the recirculating air is forced using fans.

The fireplace company is sending out a technician to our house Wednesday of next week. We're a little disappointed they are taking a week to get out here but they said they are really busy this time of year.

Obed