love our pellet stove/attempting our first door gasket replacement/Can you help? (LONG)

[Gojira]

Hello
Having lost our apartment for over a decade, my wife and I were suddenly thrust into buying a home and the tiny house we bought came with a Santa Fe Pellet stove insert. It's really really cool.

The stove was pretty banged up though and had rust on random spots.
It's always worked pretty well, and as noobs with pellet stoves, I do know enough to know to keep it really clean.

I've totally fallen in love with this thing. I love the ritual of cleaning it. I love hearing the little clinking pellets.
I love scraping the glassy clinkers off the firepot.
I even bought a headband lamp to see everything easier while I tinker with it.
My arms are getting a good workout carrying sacks of pellets too. I love keeping tabs of how certain pellet brands burn.
The roaring fire that doesn't smell like a smoke bomb in my living room is the best part.

ANYWAY.. i'm rambling

The pellet stove tech cleaned our stove. He vacuumed the stove for about an hour and pointed out that our severely frayed door gasket, needed a replacement. He didn't replace it.


He said having a good seal on that door with a fresh "tadpole" gasket is really important for an efficient pellet stove.

So, here's how the door looked. I managed to remove it last night. Being a model "B" Santa Fe, I used a phillips, not an Alan wrench to get take it off.

I have the proper tadpole gasket for the stove. It has the built in adhesive strip. My understanding is that the gasket goes only along 3 sides.
The last strip is a separate material,(that I have to pay $32 for a roll of it) and only goes on the outside front of the glass and is not part of the tadpole gasket.

I've also read that cutting a strip to size of an additional tadpole gasket can also do the trick too.

There is also some special corner tape. I ordered it but it's $25 for just a few inches of it. I'm wondering what exactly it's for other than to keep the edges from fraying. Here's a picture of the tape and the corners. I had a vision of coating it
with some Red RTV high temp silicon instead. Bad idea? The tape seems to have outlived the gasket as seen below.

Is RTV RED high temp silicon safe to use for INSIDE the pellet stove? I'm talking only for use on the interior gasket door and to maybe seal up the any gasket ends i've cut.

Our ash filter vacuum barely works. It's not very strong. I'm thinking of getting an ash filter for our shop vac. I feel I can clean the inside and out of the stove this way without ruining our shop vac with ashes.

Any further tips for this marvel? We want it to keep running and happy for as long as possible.
Sorry, there is a lot to unpack here.


Thank you

 

[kappel15]

The tadpole gasket should of came with some high temp tape, to tape the ends so they don't frey. You should be able to see how the gasket is on your door now and duplicate it. And you should be able to google a utube video on how to install gasket. And I don't understand your Philip/ allen statement as door just lifts off. I would use the tape and not the red caulk as it takes a long time to dry and will not do as good a job. kap

 

[zrock]

i just buy small shop vac's from my local canadian tire when on sale and put a drywall bag in em... if they last me a year or 2 im good with that when i only pay around $30 tops for them.. I was using my big shop vac but got to be a pain if i wanted to use it elsewhere id have to remove bag and usually tear it..

 

[Gojira]

Hello, just a long overdue follow up. I installed the tadpole gasket myself. I did a somewhat bad job of it but we managed to continue to use the stove until this past spring.

Here's a few things as a total newbie that I learned and are of my opinion only of course.

1. wear a mask.

2. the thermal tape for the frayed gasket ends on this thing is expensive. You get about 1/2" of it with your order, it's expensive and it's not very forgiving with any mistakes.

3. I gently tapped (using a hammer) a flat headed screwdriver down on the two metal poles (that you initially pop out to remove the glass.) That was the only way i could get them back in. It was like I was stuffing the gasket in.

4. I misjudged how much adhesive tadpole gasket I would need to wrap around and had to remove and redo it. It got all bunched up in the corners when I tried reinserting the glass. (see above) The corners are STUFFED in there but I'm learning, right?
(see pics)

5. the gasket replacement "worked" with my DIY install but the bottom corners of the glass would get black pretty quick after a few cycles. The stove itself is over a decade old and basically sputtered and wouldn't stay lit but that was months after my work on it.

The pics of my work are below but just wanted to share what I learned and thank you guys.
We love our pellet stove and are considering getting a brand new one.