Jabberwocky's Quadra Fire Install

My take on the Quadra Fire Mt Vernon AE -

It's quiet, a bit louder than a ceiling fan on high. It's plug and play, 100% controlled via the digital thermostat.

The old fire place had some sort of heat recirculator system powered by fans built into the square grates on the floor and they'd push air through the top. I ran this a few times with minifans and it sure did pump out some extremely hot air! I guess that was a 1946 version of wood furnace! It was in rough shape on the inside, it was feeling its 60 years.

I'll be getting the battery back up system going sometime before the winter, the stove smartly cycles between high and maintenance burn when she's drawing juice from the batteries because the auto-starter would obviously draw too much energy. I live in a city and we seem to lose power once a year when we get a bad ice storm. When I lose power, thousands of others do too, so the trucks are out there within 30 minutes fixing the issue, but I'll still get the system in case "the big one hits."

This baby will be heating 1650 sq ft in a well insulated but northward oriented home with 29 windows (most windows facing the lake to the north, of course). I'll be running a few ceiling fans on low and may experiment with a door jam mini-fan to get heat out to back room (this home is NOT open concept.)

Besides obvious quality requirements, for me, looks were the key. Only the Enviro Empress comes close to looking like this.

Looks awesome, great job.

Jab, that looks sharp.The unit has a nice "Victorian" look to it, especially with that surround .Enjoy your automatic heat.

Nice!!

Are your going to be burning corn, pellets or other in it?

Now that's a nice install!! Beautiful room, great job. :coolsmile:

Wood pellets although the New England Wood Pellets contain 4% corn. I ordered 3 tons of Canadian Premium softwood although the dealer insisted that 2 would do ... we'll see.

Corn is a bit expensive here. If it was cheaper than wood then I would absolutely mix it.

As for the future, I think we'll be seeing switchgrass sooner or later. My dealer joked to me that the stuff grows like a weed, they literally cannot kill it and eastern Canada is particularly well suited for it ... so that's what we'll see here in New England.

I believe it's not really corn but rather a corn syrup or corn oil that has been added to the premium hardwoods (Jaffrey blend).
It was added (from what i understand) to help cut down on the amount of clinkers that the hardwoods are known to produce.
And it seemed to work, as the NE from this year seemed to form less clinkers than the year before. But I only burned 1 ton of them this year, as I now prefer the softwoods.
Nice stove, let us know how she runs.

Great looking unit. I looked at one for my fireplace, and almost fainted from sticker shock.

You get what you pay for.