Quadra Fire Castile not hot enough

I have a Sante Fe that I heat my house with and it is 1500 sq. ft. Same stove, just a different dress. Be sure to clean all exhaust path thru stove. Also make sure you clean the heat exchanger tubes. Also have you set the flame height per owners manual page 22? And are you running on high? kap

Nice lively flame? Are you running on low/med/or high? These units are "space heaters" that can heat a whole house. It will just take a while to do so. Also depends on home age, insulation, windows, etc. You may have to supplement both. I run my furnace on a programmable thermostat to come on at 5 am before we get up. It is set to 70. It shuts off at 8am. It comes back on at 4:30 to heat home before we get home. While we are home, just the stove runs, and I can keep my home at a balmy 75* running on just medium. I have been home for a few days and am only using the stove to heat the home. It is not cold enough yet for me to turn the furnace on, so house can be 64 in the morning when I get up. It will take the stove at least 4 hours to bring the house up to 70 from that temp. kap

And if you keep having issues, I would call the dealer to check things out to see why this stove will not heat your house as it should. He should of checked your house out and made sure this model stove was capable of taking care of it. kap

Mikeflys said:

Hello everyone.
Is it possible to increase the heat output from my new stove? About 2 months ago we sold our wood stove and replaced it with this pellet stove. I have to admit I am disappointed, I think we made a bad choice. At first it was nice, I like the ease of cleaning, much less ash. But now that winter is really here this stove is just not warm enough. We have a smallish house, about 1300 square feet. We wanted to use only this stove for heat, but it only seems to be able to heat our house up to 70 maybe 71 degrees. At first it would easily warm our house to 75 but now it just can't seem to do it. I have gone though the stove and cleaned everything as per the manual. Our outside temp is in the low 20's. Is it just to much too expect this stove to heat a 1300 square foot house?

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Usually with complaints on heat output in a house your size we find out one of two things: Some passage someplace didn't get cleaned, that one unknown spot in the stove. Invariably the owner says as you are saying, "oh I cleaned it well". True but you didn't know about this quirk, ya know, maybe. Not saying this is the case on this stove, just that we have seen it over and over again in the forum. You have been running it long enough to run into a cleaning issue. One other possibility is a poor setup, not trimmed right etc. Any stove will heat just about any house in the warmer weather, the test comes as the cold stuff comes along.

Or the house is loose, not insulated etc.

And sometimes a stove is not set up optimally or the owner is in a pellet saving mindset.

That stove is rated for up to 1700 sq ft, assuming decent construction and insulation, good windows etc. I would expect and it's not unreasonable to expect it to heat 1300 quite well actually, assuming the same.

Hope it all works out for you. The stoves do take a while to heat an area up. kap

Mikeflys said:

I understand what you are saying, but. I am a maintenance te chnician by trade. I understand cleaning systems and I can assure you it was cleaned properly. It is heating better after the cleaning. I may just not have given it enough time before I posted.

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Although I don't care for hearing it sometimes, keeping my P61distribution fan on or near high goes a long ways towards heating the entire house and quicker recovery as well. In my house 9 and most everyones on the forum) the worst thing I can do is vary house temp, way further ahead to keep steady heat going. Pellet stoves are slow to recover house heat, they can do it but it's a way different curve than coal, wood or oil.

Hi Mikeflys. I suspect this could also be a problem of heat loss. And expectations. 1300 SF is toward the upper end of what this stove could handle in a somewhat cold environment if the house is not reasonably well sealed and insulated. Based on that, you may find that you get the biggest payback by focusing on minimizing the amount of heat you lose. As for expectations, 75 is just plain hot for winter, for many people, and that extra 5 degrees is a big expectation for a small pellet stove heating even a small house in cold temps.

I also wonder how big a wood stove was needed to heat your home to 75? From having used wood stoves for 35 years prior to going to pellets I know there is a big heat curve using a wood stove and it's hard to maintain a 75 degree temp setting. It sounds like you should of gone to a larger stove based on your wanting the house to stay at 75.

Mikeflys said:

Hello everyone.
Is it possible to increase the heat output from my new stove? About 2 months ago we sold our wood stove and replaced it with this pellet stove. I have to admit I am disappointed, I think we made a bad choice. At first it was nice, I like the ease of cleaning, much less ash. But now that winter is really here this stove is just not warm enough. We have a smallish house, about 1300 square feet. We wanted to use only this stove for heat, but it only seems to be able to heat our house up to 70 maybe 71 degrees. At first it would easily warm our house to 75 but now it just can't seem to do it. I have gone though the stove and cleaned everything as per the manual. Our outside temp is in the low 20's. Is it just to much too expect this stove to heat a 1300 square foot house?

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What pellets are you burning? Are you running on High?

Wooden Head said:

What pellets are you burning? Are you running on High?

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I second this. Pellet quality can have a huge impact on the heat output of my castile. Also, I find that my stove needs the feed control arm all the way out (I actually removed mine), at least when burning big box store pellets. I've actually bumped the feed rate up 10% beyond that by adjusting the settings on the control box. You want your flame to be a few inches out of the burnpot (on average) when running on high.

I also recommend trying the partial airwash obstruction I discussed in this thread: https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads...tput-by-limiting-airwash.149315/#post-2008592. I've had success with increasing heat output this way.

I just had an Castile insert installed this summer, and this is my first winter using it to heat our house, which is around 1300 sqft as well on the main floor. I also run ours off a thermostat on a schedule like Kap does. I have ours set to 65 at night (11pm to 6am) and then to 71 ( 6am to 11pm) during the day. Most days it takes 4-5 hours to get the house up to 71 from 65, some days it takes longer if it's in the low 20's outside. Then it may stay off until around 4 pm, or so then kick on a few more times for about an hour until 11pm. All of this is while the stove is on high, medium just won't cut it.

Our house is from 1860 and not very well insulated, and we are on top of a hill with no trees...so considering all this the stove does pretty well. I'm not sure how it will do if it gets close to zero outside, but we'll see. Either way I think we are near the top end of what this stove can handle space wise, but nevertheless I am happy with it.

I think I would have liked to go with a larger BTU pellet stove (Mt Vernon AE) so it would kick out more heat and not have to run as much, but it wouldn't fit in the area we had and also cost quite a bit more. Oh well...

Also, I wonder, would upgrading to a larger stove such as a Mt. Vernon solve your issue? Maybe Kap or somebody with experience with Quads would know if it would be worth it? Maybe your dealer would be willing to take the Castile back if you upgraded to a larger one? It's only been 60 days....I would consider it, don't want to be unhappy with your purchase for years if you can fix it now for $800-1000 upgrade. I would....just my opinion.

Sometimes you just don't know until something (a pellet stove in this example, could be anything, a generator, a riding lawn mower...) is the right model or version until you install it or use it. This happens when you have multiple variations of a product line and varying factors such as house insulation, windows, etc.

I've ran a Sante Fe for years in an old farm house of similar size. And it struggled to hold temp when temps dropped to single digits and below. But I have never tried to maintain 75+ in the house. I try to keep it 68 - 70.

My only solution was to get a bigger pellet stove. Now I have all the excess BTU's i'd ever want and have had the main floor up to 90 on highest setting with good pellets. So far this year it has not been to cold and running on lowest setting will still maintain 75. Still to hot for me!

As mentioned above. If you stove has a feed plate like the Sante Fe. You will need to adjust it depending on the pellets you run. I've had it set wide open for some crap pellets. But when I found some good ones, I made an extension to cut back the feed more than the plate allowed. You may just need more fuel!

Sounds like you have a good solution. I have my furnace set to 67, but my Castile can keep it up to temp (just has to run a lot to keep up sometimes), but I am trying not to use any propane at all if possible this winter. We'll see how it goes when it gets really cold....wish you the best!

Mikeflys said:

Thanks everyone for your reply's. To answer a few of the questions flying around. Our wood stove was a Quadra fire 4300. And yes it would easily heat our house to over 80 if we weren't carful. We are burning Lignetics pellets, we experimented with a few different brands and for the price the Lignetics seemed to give us the best output. I think we have solved the overall problem. After cleaning the stove I was just a little impatient in waiting for it to supply enough heat. We are back to our 73-74 range. I also made the decision to use our furnace and keep it set at 69. That way the poor little stove doesn't have to work so hard.

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I'm glad you got it figured out. We just moved from a house with a wood stove to one with a pellet stove. The heating qualities are just entirely different. We will be switching back to a wood stove because of this.

I run the propane furnace at night when coldest and castille during day.This seems to work good for me
I burned a lot of pellets trying to heat with stove alone last year.and with propane at 1.79/ gal right now it's working good.