woodslinger said:
How many break in fires did you do? Have you packed the massive firebox and not overfired the unit? What are some real world burn times? If you have had the Z42 cd for several years, are you pleased or had to replace anything? Would you buy the same unit again?
Any other comments are welcome
I did 2 break-in fires I guess. One was a smaller one, just to take the chill off one day and got lots of paint smell, then another time I darn near over-fired it and got a little more nasty smell.
Well, I haven't yet packed the firebox so I can't say for sure. I have filled it pretty full and I was sweating bullets thinking I was going to over-fire it (even with the damper 100% closed) but it only hit about 640 before coming back down again. I'm somewhat afraid I'll over-fire it when the real cold weather gets here.
Not sure on burn times yet either, I've mostly been burning my crappy wood, back, and small stuff for the shoulder season.
I don't think I would buy the same unit again. It's really a combination of things, I'll just list them all.
#1 After my first fire all the door gaskets fell off with a bunch of fine, white powdery stuff. All I can figure out is that they used 500 degree silicon to stick them on rather than gasket cement because I couldn't find any traces of cement anywhere but lots of the fine white powder stuff (silicone, when heated to high temps breaks down to a fine white powdery residue). This ****ed me off more than anything, I shouldn't have to deal with that crap after the first fire; Kozyheat was clearly cutting corners on stuff, but I don't understand why because gasket cement is cheaper than high temp silicone.
#2 The warranty, while it seems good on the outside, has a lot of exclusions etc in it; there are other companies with a much better warranty out there.
#3 Even with the draft closed all the way this thing is darn near over-firing itself every time I have a fire. I hate to see what it'll do when I put some good, high BTU wood in it like Osage Orange...
#4 The shield on top of the firebox (between the firebox and the outer shield of the unit) is not supported in any way. What happens is this shield sags down in the middle, and the slight bend they put on it to "add strength" doesn't add much strength at all, it just gives the sheet metal a place to kink rather than bow. I still haven't come up with a solution for this. It bugs me all the time because if you're anywhere 5 feet or more away from it you can see it sagging down through the grate; it just looks "tacky".
#5 The duct punch outs were done really stupid. They're cut so they're only be held my thin little pieces of metal. Sounds easy to punch them out right? Wrong, they left 3 attachment points so rather than being able to twist it out, you have to pry, nip, pry, nip and generally twist and bend the crap out of the sheet metal to get the dang things out. The 2nd set of punch-outs is in the un-supported piece of sheet metal mentioned in #4. Try reaching down through a 6" hole of sharp sheet metal, and trying to get those punch-outs out of an unsupported piece of sheet-metal without bending it all up and/or cutting yourself on sharp edges. That was one long night of frustration (luckily with not cuts, just scrapes) that I was glad to have over with.
#6 The handles on the CD model bug me. The left one is welded fast (stationary, decorative handle only), the right one is the adjustable one. The way the right handle is designed it is set at a fixed angle when latched; even if you adjust it to make it tighter or looser it has to be rotated a full revolution. This isn't a big problem until you get to the part where the handles are welded on at different angles. So one handle sticks nearly straight down, and the other one is nearly sideways. That looks even more tacky than the sagging sheet-metal because it is very noticeable.
#7 The way the cast door seals/latches causes it to flex a lot. It pulls in tight at the bottom where the latch is but not so tight at the top. So what you have is a noticeably twisted door; it's about 1/8" out from the left door at the top, but flush at the bottom. This unevenness is, once again, "tacky".
#8 I don't like the door latch system either. I would have been really easy for them to make the latch cam into place. Rather, they made it so that it's just a straight latch. What that means is the you have to push extremely hard on the door to get the latch to engage. This can't be fixed by loosening the latch up either, if you loosen the latch up it would leak. So I'm left with pushing very hard, then turning the latch to engage it.
IMHO, this unit is poorly engineered. It seems pretty well built, but the design specs/engineering are just off. The latch could be fixed with a better design. The door twisting could have been fixed by anticipating the problem when having the right side door cast (cast a pre-twist into it). The sheet-metal could have been bent in order to properly support itself or have some sort of support built in. The duct punch outs would be much easier to work with if they only had 2 connecting pieces left (poor design). The draft control needs to have some sort of system to at least partially block off the secondaries when the draft is completely closed. I realize that closing off the air all the way leads to smoldering and inefficient burning but I'd rather take an inefficient burn over an over-fired fireplace; once again, it's a simple design flaw. The door gasket issue was just plain 100% corner cutting IMHO, and should never, ever happen with a reputable company.
Other than all that, the unit heats well, it was affordable (vs some of the other options that were $5k+), and it does heat my home.
