Hi everyone,
I live in Upstate NY. I got this Ashby St. Croix pellet stove about three years ago but don't use it much since I have a furnace to heat my house that uses natural gas. The insulation in my 1400 sq ft colonial isn't that great since the house was built in 1924. The company that installed this put some insulation somewhere around the unit. I also blew in some insulation in my attic which seems to have helped during this cold winter. Anyway, today being March 12, it's the first day I've used this pellet stove this year. I just haven't been impressed with it, unless I'm using it wrong.
Issues:
1. It takes about 8 hours of running on the highest setting for the room to be somewhat warm (70 degrees).
2. If I open the top door (hopper?) to add pellets while the unit is running, then the fire goes out almost immediately. I have to turn the unit off, which takes another 20 minutes, then add the starting gel and wait another 8 hours for the room to warm back up (see my first issue).
3. I used to have trouble getting the unit to kick on and have the fire go but I just add a ton of starting gel to the cup of pellets in that middle box, and I light it with a long stick lighter, and it seems to do the job sometimes. This only works sometimes though. Just now after experiencing issue #2 noted above, I started it up again using the gel and the fire was going, I walked away to type this post, and now the fire is totally out and will not come back to life.
4. Like I said, it takes about 8 hours to get the living room warmed up to around 70. My basement and upstairs floor will drop to 55 degrees though. I don't want this to happen. To counter this, if my thermostat of my furnace reads the room temperature at 70, I will set it to 72, but this requires constant adjusting. This seems to work ok since I don't have a dual or multi zone furnace for my house (it's a Trane XL90). I want to know if there's a better way to do this. Otherwise the furnace will NEVER kick on if I keep it set lower.
5. Room temperature will not go much above 70 degrees.
6. Let's say I want to run this 24/7 but I need to clean it every day or two. That requires shutting it off. Then I'm back to the above mentioned problems with getting it to turn back on and/or heat the place up in a sufficient amount of time.
My goal is to run it 24/7 since I could save maybe $50 a month in the winter, and have the rooms a bit warmer since I normally leave my furnace on 60 degrees and my bill is $200 to $250 a month in the winter and the furnace runs constantly. Bill is even higher if I try setting the furnace to 61 to 65. I've never ran this unit more than 8 hours before of the first issue I listed above. I usually just give up then since issue number 2 makes this a stupid process.
I had the company that sold and installed the unit look at it before and they said it's fine.
Any help for my issues would be great. Thank you.
I live in Upstate NY. I got this Ashby St. Croix pellet stove about three years ago but don't use it much since I have a furnace to heat my house that uses natural gas. The insulation in my 1400 sq ft colonial isn't that great since the house was built in 1924. The company that installed this put some insulation somewhere around the unit. I also blew in some insulation in my attic which seems to have helped during this cold winter. Anyway, today being March 12, it's the first day I've used this pellet stove this year. I just haven't been impressed with it, unless I'm using it wrong.
Issues:
1. It takes about 8 hours of running on the highest setting for the room to be somewhat warm (70 degrees).
2. If I open the top door (hopper?) to add pellets while the unit is running, then the fire goes out almost immediately. I have to turn the unit off, which takes another 20 minutes, then add the starting gel and wait another 8 hours for the room to warm back up (see my first issue).
3. I used to have trouble getting the unit to kick on and have the fire go but I just add a ton of starting gel to the cup of pellets in that middle box, and I light it with a long stick lighter, and it seems to do the job sometimes. This only works sometimes though. Just now after experiencing issue #2 noted above, I started it up again using the gel and the fire was going, I walked away to type this post, and now the fire is totally out and will not come back to life.
4. Like I said, it takes about 8 hours to get the living room warmed up to around 70. My basement and upstairs floor will drop to 55 degrees though. I don't want this to happen. To counter this, if my thermostat of my furnace reads the room temperature at 70, I will set it to 72, but this requires constant adjusting. This seems to work ok since I don't have a dual or multi zone furnace for my house (it's a Trane XL90). I want to know if there's a better way to do this. Otherwise the furnace will NEVER kick on if I keep it set lower.
5. Room temperature will not go much above 70 degrees.
6. Let's say I want to run this 24/7 but I need to clean it every day or two. That requires shutting it off. Then I'm back to the above mentioned problems with getting it to turn back on and/or heat the place up in a sufficient amount of time.
My goal is to run it 24/7 since I could save maybe $50 a month in the winter, and have the rooms a bit warmer since I normally leave my furnace on 60 degrees and my bill is $200 to $250 a month in the winter and the furnace runs constantly. Bill is even higher if I try setting the furnace to 61 to 65. I've never ran this unit more than 8 hours before of the first issue I listed above. I usually just give up then since issue number 2 makes this a stupid process.
I had the company that sold and installed the unit look at it before and they said it's fine.
Any help for my issues would be great. Thank you.
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