So the photo was not my stove. I bought a home in 2914 and am restoring a 3100i when I discovered a huge hole blown in the manifold joint. My initial thought was an overview situation. I was pretty annoyed w the seller and the mfg but felt a little better after finding some mention of this in these forums.
I have to ditto
@bholler. My more extreme situation may or may not be the result of neglect. I’m not beating myself up too much for not crawling into the firebox to discover this in the 15 min I had b4 buying. Lord knows I will next time... but any doofus should have seen the cracks and then the gaping hole when operating, inspecting and servicing their stove/insert over the years. I’ll try to add my pics and some of the parts/fix for others in a separate post.
BUT the pic above is from a different stove. The owner of the pictured insert heavily used the stove but was - to quote his wife - a “fire-nazi” about service and keeping the burns under control. They noticed the cracks, made the warranty claim, and had the kit professionally installed. From reading these older forums that’s a pretty typical story for the we 3100i ACTs, and for some contemporary 4100/ and 5100s (not sure if precise models but if you dig, several models are discussed in hearth.com.
Crystal clear to me that this is a product/design defect. And probably one that violates an implied warranty of merchantability and/or fitness for intended purpose-which is in some states not waivable esp for consumer products. Probably not a products liability (strict liability tort or negligence) problem if there is no issue with the manifold defect impacting the integrity of the firebox or causing a safety issue. Only impact appears to be performance/efficiency.
I commend QF for engineering a fix and (eventually) making parts available (albeit only through their distribution channel) free/cheap.
My main warranty/defect process criticism is that I had to work darn hard to figure this out, and even harder to get info and parts from QF. This seems a pervasive problem. It’s a quadrafure problem and they should own it in a bit more transparent manner, getting (for example) the fix kits and instructions up on their website and perhaps explaining the problem. It’s lame that I had to rely on you good folks to illuminate their oops. And doubly lame that they will not take a call from a consumer and won’t return an email or text except with a roboresponse directing you to one of their dealers.
I’m no expert on this market, but I can tell you that the warranty process and behavior reflects badly on any OEM of a relatively high end consumer product. Even if this is completely resolved in the newer ACC models, I’d weigh these customer service accounts heavily if buying a new $3500 stove.
