Wednesday evening, WBWI and I talked on the phone. He has a Quadrafire 7100 fireplace like we have. I described our issues and tried to compare what I was seeing to what he sees with his fireplace. I was attempting to determine whether or not I was imagining our burning issues or whether they were real. Talking to WBWI helped. He said that his fireplace will burn just as big with the glass doors shut as with them open as long as he has the air control all the way open. He said that he did not have seasoned wood during the first year after his fireplace was installed but that he does not remember the fireplace acting any differently with the unseasoned wood as with the seasoned wood had used in subsequent years. WBWI was very helpful. He even went onto the Quadrafire page on Facebook and posed a question to the company for me. Thanks WBWI!
The questions concerning the fireplace started discouraging my wife. We literally designed the house around the fireplace, the fireplace being the central feature of the house. We placed the fireplace at an interior wall for heating efficiency. My wife did tons of research picking this fireplace. So to be questioning whether or not the fireplace was working correctly started weighing on her. It did not help that the fireplace tech had never worked on the model we have.
This week the fireplace tech called Quadrafire and relayed our questions. We could not call Quadrafire directly ourselves, The manufacturer gave the standard response - "Your wood is too wet. The chimney may be positioned such that it doesn't draft well. etc. etc." The manufacturer did not provide any resolution options other than for us to use different wood or rebuild our house.
I decided to get involved and called the local fireplace company who installed the unit and who was consulted in every piece of the design (fireplace location, location of ducts, heat zones, etc.). I ended up talking to a couple people at the local store, one of which was the local technician. They made some calls and talked to a service manager in Charlotte. The fireplace store is a national chain. The Charlotte service manager said that he had a customer with our exact same symptoms. He said that our fireplace ships with a screw that prevents the outside combusion air damper from being damaged during shipping. This screw must be removed to allow correct operation of the combustion air damper. The fireplace's installation manual says nothing about this screw. The tech who installed our fireplace is sure he did not remove such a screw. The Charlotte service manager said he is 99% sure that is our problem.
So the new fireplace tech we've been talking to and the store's district manager are coming out Monday to remove the screw. Unfortunately, we will have to cut through sheetrock in the master bath to be able to get to the fireplace. However, if this fixes the problem, we won't mind at all cutting the sheetrock. The fireplace people have been very helpful so far and did try real hard to help us. They could have easily just dismissed our case like the manufacture and said it was a problem with the wood, our education, etc.
To be sure, we had some "dry" firewood delivered to the house yesterday. Supposedly, the wood was cut over 6 months ago and has been stored under a tarp. The wood is Ash. I'm not totally convinced the wood is that old but I've heard that Ash burns real well, even when it is freshly cut.
I realize a lot of the problems tech support folks see are of the common dumb mistakes, but I get real tired of hearing "Is it plugged in? Is it turned on? Did you try rebooting?" when I'm well past that point already....
