Quest plus burn problem

if you have not done so do these: clean combustion blower & its impeller (must remove from unit to do a good job). clean vent pipe pipe.
If the quest is like all the other whitfields you 'll have to remove the bricks, access the air paths that run down behind the firewall. No shortcuts. You will need the bricks, not just for show.

quest plus is a great stove, as stated above clean blower and that exhaust. Next to air tubes are channels that get filled up
I always use fire squares to light, seems to work better than gel
mine is in a old wood stove chimney and it works fine

I have this same stove with a similar problem I had a very lazy flame regardless of how much I turned the air knob. In all likelihood the air chambers are plugged and need to be cleaned out.

There is no way to access the air paths behind the firewall. Removing the bricks does not reveal an access panel. If you call Lennox they will direct you to drill a large hole behind the bricks.

The best idea is to full clean the stove, then disconnect the vacuum switch located to the left of the control panel. You will have to remove the screw to allow the panel to swing open. Then with the door of the stove slightly open take a leave blower and connect the suction side of it to the exhaust pipe located outside your home. Turn the blower on and it should suck out a large amount of ash / soot.

If you cannot access the exhaust pipe outside the house, I know of one owner that used a shop vac on the exhaust pipe inside his house with success.

The problem is the air chambers on either side of the firebox as well as the tube that connects the left air chamber to the exhaust fan get plugged up and you cannot easily clean them out.

If you have an air compressor you maybe able to blow the ash / soot out of the air chambers. These air chambers can be located to the far left and far right at the top of the firebox to either side of the tubes that push heated air into the room.

Rick.......

The fact that it's burning better indicates you are on the right track. You must still get that ash out that's plugged up the stove… use a small hammer and tap the back and sides of the burn chamber to help loosen that ash. Better yet move the stove outside and connect a leaf blower in the vent and suck out all that ash.

Here is how I clean my Quest exhaust side.
First I clean the 3in exhaust pipe with the vent brush.
Second, I use a long bottle brush to clean all the way down into the vertical exhaust ports on either side of the heat exchanger (top corners). Don't, don't, don't get it stuck in there. Then, I pull the exhaust motor and clean the vertical parts of the exhaust before and after the motor. Open the damper to get the stove end and use the bottle brush. Then, the use vacuum through the motor hole to get the ash.
After that, I cover the motor hole with a dicey cardboard template I made and then go with the leaf blower from the end of the vent(outside the house!). Don't want to spin the exhaust motor at x zillion rpm with the blower, hence the template.
Replace the motor using a new gasket(you'll break it) and you're good to go.
I do this just once a year after about two tons per. YMMV.

After a few years, it's easy.

On this stove you need the firebrick, it's a safety thing. Hook the leaf blower to the end of the 3in pipe. If you can't get to it, you might have to forget the leaf blower. If you move the stove outside, you can get to it.

Best luck.

Neilt said:

The stove seems to just run a pipe into the old brick chimney from a wood stove. The pipe does not extend the length of the chimney.

This is my first Pellot stove, so I am learning as I got on this. Thanks for any help.

Click to expand...

Hello Neilt, and welcome to the forum. In 2008 I was in a situation much like yours. My stove is also a Quest Plus vented in an old masonry chimney. See photos here of my flue and house with the 60 feet chimney. I live on the third floor right under the roof.


From reading here at Hearth.com I learned llttle by little how to maintain and tweek the stove for best performance and these days it runs like a charm.
Now, my living room is quite small, so the stove mostly runs on the two lowest settings. This makes the stove soot up quickly, so in my case a deep cleaning is necessary twice every season. These pics show the impeller on the combustion blower before and after cleaning. Note: My scrapings in the soot layer clearly indicate the chronology of the burn characteristic as the soot layer builds up... the innermost layer right after cleaning is light greyish ( = good burn ) and the outermost layer is dark and sooty ( = bad burn ). After each deep clean it burns like a brand new stove with a draft so violent that the damper needs to be pushed in a bit.

Yes, the different cleaning advice given by the members in this thread is the way to go. Only one cleaning method is not possible in our chimney set up: The leaf blower trick. Also an Outside Air Kit is very difficult to install on my stove. But then again, my house is old and drafty, so there's plenty of fresh air

BTW. the modification ( ash clean out ports ) suggested by forum member Ricks is something I am planning to do in the future, as it would make cleaning of the "exhaust manifold" much much easier. Ricks states that Lennox will be helpful, if we contact them on this matter, and that is what I intend to do. The Profile 20 is the stove that succeeded the Quest Plus and the Profile 20 ( of the second generation ) is built with these ash clean out ports, as we can see here:


Neilt, I hope that you will become as happy for your Quest Plus as I am. And if any issues turn up, there's always a bunch of helpful people here at Hearth.com.

Bo

nice! pics of dead mouse or it didn't happen. lol

The Whitfield Quest is one of the original pellet stoves. So it does not have a lot of the bells and whistles of the later models. The Quest was not sold with an auto igniter or a thermostat. I understand you have a Quest Plus which is a later model and that may an igniter and thermostat available.

With my Quest the hopper holds well over fifty pounds of pellets. You should be able to run the stove all day without refilling. In general I fill the hopper once a day (40 pounds) and have never come close to running out. The burn rate does depend on what you have set the pellet feed to; a lower feed rate would mean a longer burn time, and a higher feed rate would mean a shorter burn time.

While the Quest may not have all of the nice features of later stoves, it is a very simple and very reliable stove. My stove is almost 20 years old and given me very few problems.

Rick.........

I sort of have the opposite problem in that I can't seem to set my Quest's damper low enough to allow for a feed rate on low. I would like to turn the stove down to the "barely burning" point sometimes, just to avoid having to turn it off after the room gets warm. But it burns so well that even with damper on low it can burn up pellets. Great when you want heat, but wish I could turn it down even more. I wonder if a different grate would hold the pellet coals a bit longer and allow for this rather than letting them slip through the slats?

We also have a Mt Vernon AE so I have both ends of the tech spectrum. I'm not sure which I prefer sometimes!