Quad 1200 Unable to Heat House

[1RADGUY]

Got a Quad 1200 in late summer 2013 to take place of old woodstove. Did it more for ease of use and regulation of temp. Was told stove was perfect fit for our use. Have a 2400sf house, but really only wanted to heat downstairs which is 1200 sf. First semi cold day, temps in 40's, Quad took several hours to heat from 68 to 74. When temp is below 25 or so, Quad will not heat our downstairs. We have to turn on oil run furnace to heat house to 74. At that point, Quad can't maintain that temp. We run our 2 ceiling mounted fans in living room to circulate air. Yes, they are switched to run in winter. With the extreme cold we are having, the Quad really doesn't do anything. I feel the hot air, but the Quad thermostat and furnace thermostat don't move. Again, we have to turn on the furnace. Have had service down twice to check it out only to be told the Quad is working fine. The house is an old farmhouse, with little insulation. Is Quad too small for house? Is there a mechanical isue with it? Basically, did I spend thousands for nothing? Anyone else with this issue? Wife is very upset with me since it was my idea! She loved the woodstove haet!

 

[bbfarm]

"The house is an old farmhouse, with little insulation"

That kind of says a lot right there. It also depends on your floor plan and where the stove is.

 

[1RADGUY]

"The house is an old farmhouse, with little insulation"

That kind of says a lot right there. It also depends on your floor plan and where the stove is.

I realize that's probably an issue, but is it the whole issue? The salesman says he has other people complaining of the same problem. He tells me I need to figure out the air circulation in my living room. That's why I mentioned the 2 ceiling fans. Living room is roughly a 15X25 rectangle with stove in a corner blowing into middle of living room. The Quad thermostat is about 8 feet away on a wall. So the blowing heat has difficulty raising the temp on that thermostat. Just more info trying to solve my issue. And i do have 2 insulation contractors coming on Thursday to see how much difference that makes.

 

[moey]

How big is your furnace?

How big was the woodstove it replaced?

Although your only heating downstairs its like having a door open if your not heating the upstairs.

Do you have it fully cranked?

Sounds like you need some insulation. Fully cranked it will probably only put out 40k btu maybe a little less that would have a hard time in uninsulated home.

I lived in a uninsulated home for a while the only time I was warm was when I sat on the radiator.

 

[1RADGUY]

I believe furnace is 95000 BTU's. Old woodstove was a Fisher Papa Bear. Loved that stove. And yes, we run it fully cranked. Again, got pellet stove for ease of use, like when daughter gets home from school, house would already be warm. Furnace heats home in minutes. Insulation sounds like the issue. I do have 2 insulation contractors coming Thursday to give me ideas and estimates. We have a cellar with zero insulation and the pellet stove is first floor.

 

[rparker]

I have a Quad CB1200 and know what you are talking about. Also have an old house with poor insulation and sealing. One thing to remember is that a pellet stove is a space heater, it is not meant to heat an entire house. The savings I get with the stove are when temps are cold (20 - 40 degrees) but not frigid. When it gets down into the teens and below, I do wind up burning oil but it is what I expected. If you are expecting it to replace a Fisher Papa Bear ( a beast of a heater), you will be discouraged. I am working on insulating and sealing but still don't expect to heat the whole place with my stove when the temps plummet.

 

[DMKNLD]

Welcome to this forum, 1RadGuy. The best energy conserving thing I have done since putting my Quad pellet stove in service was to join this message board group. You will find many fellow Quad owners on this board with the 'pellet passion' to help you with your stove and your 'mission'. So, to answer your perhaps rhetorical question, no, you didn't spend 'thousands for nothing'. It will just take looking at each component of your 'energy use equation' and modifying them as best you can, when you can. Granted, that can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but try not to get frustrated - everyone on this board has 'been there done that'. You came to the right place to get some help.

The next best energy conserving effort we have done to date was to have an energy audit done on our house (costs about $250 from what I recall).They set up a huge calibrated negative pressure fan to pull air out of the house to determine where the air leaks were, and they did infrared heat loss measurements throughout the whole house to see where we could best prioritize our insulation and heat retention efforts. I would highly recommend that to anyone who wants to reduce their carbon foot print.

I have a smaller sized Quadrafire, the Castile, that puts about 30,000 BTU's vs the Classic Bay 1200's 47,000 BTU output, and we are heating about the same sq footage as you in our drafty 1870's New England farmhouse, also with no insulation in the walls and maybe a foot of batting insulation in the ceilings. So something doesn't seem right with your stove's heat output. What type / quality of pellets are you burning? Do you keep the stove clean to get the most efficiency out of it ? Do you have an OAK - outside air kit, to minimize your cold air drafts being pulled in by the stoves combustion blower? All these things determine your stoves relative heat output. Use the search option at the upper right corner of the page and you will find hours and hours of informative reading on each of these topics.

My Quad can keep the main part of our farmhouse, which has 2 floors, in the low to mid 70's when our Vermont Castings wood stove is helping out from the far end of the house, even when temps are in the single digits here in Maine. Typically the oil furnace only kicks in when it is windy and below zero and we haven't kept the wood stove stoked overnight, then typically only in the pre-dawn to dawn hours when outside temps are the coldest, and before the sun comes up to help w/ some south facing solar input.

We do have to move some air around to help distribute the heat, (rparker is spot on, pellet stoves are really only an alternative fuel source space heater), using floor fans blowing the cold air towards the room the pellet stove is in, which works better IMO than using the overhead ceiling fans. We close off a downstairs rooms we don't regularly use, and shrink film our windows to help with heat retention, spray foamed the sills and granite fieldstone foundation joints to minimize drafts from the basement, etc. So there is no single 'magic bullet' fix to reducing 'dino oil' dependency, but all the little things done in consort has saved us a bunch of money.

Over 6 winters now we have burned an avg of 4 tons of pellets and maybe 1 1/2 cords or so of firewood per year. But that certainly beats the avg of 1200 gallons of fuel oil the couple who owned our farmhouse before us burned over a winter. We burn maybe 150 gallons of fuel oil a year now, mostly to heat our hot water, and to supplement the pellet stove in cold winters like this has been. So our pellet stove and related insulating efforts have payed us back in value hundreds of times over.

 

[bbfarm]

We heat our old 147 yr old 4 bedroom 2 story farm house entirely with our pellet stove.

When it was -47 with the wind chill it kept the main room it is in at 70 degrees at level 4 out of 5 and the upstairs at 65

We only ran the furnace 1 hour to warm up the basement.

A lot depends on where the stove is located too. I would have loved to have ours in the living room but the dining room is the central room of our house.

We are lucky and have good insulation. This year we put plastic on some of the windows and that helped a lot too

 

[DMKNLD]

We have our

We heat our old 147 yr old 4 bedroom 2 story farm house entirely with our pellet stove.

When it was -47 with the wind chill it kept the main room it is in at 70 degrees at level 4 out of 5 and the upstairs at 65

We only ran the furnace 1 hour to warm up the basement.

A lot depends on where the stove is located too. I would have loved to have ours in the living room but the dining room is the central room of our house.

We are lucky and have good insulation. This year we put plastic on some of the windows and that helped a lot too

I concur bbfarm that location and convective air flow patterns are a big part of relative pellet stove efficiency. We have our pellet stove in the dining room also, which is the most central room in our farmhouse, and the best to distribute the heat from. We have a wood stove in the family room at the far end of our L-shaped floor foot print, which makes it quieter when the TV is on not having to compete with the convection blower noise.

I don't mind the pellet blower 'white noise', which is in the next room over from our master bedroom. But the wifey, not so much, and she will close the bedroom door, (which is on the cold N side of our house), then she wonders why it is 55 F in the bedroom but 75 F in the rest of the house!

I almost replaced the wood stove w/ a 2nd pellet stove this past fall for the considerably less hassle and mess vs dealing w/ firewood, but glad we didn't after a 3 day power outage in the NE ice storm at Christmas.

 

[SwineFlue]

I realize that's probably an issue, but is it the whole issue? The salesman says he has other people complaining of the same problem. He tells me I need to figure out the air circulation in my living room. That's why I mentioned the 2 ceiling fans. Living room is roughly a 15X25 rectangle with stove in a corner blowing into middle of living room. The Quad thermostat is about 8 feet away on a wall. So the blowing heat has difficulty raising the temp on that thermostat. Just more info trying to solve my issue. And i do have 2 insulation contractors coming on Thursday to see how much difference that makes.

Are you running the stove on its highest settings, and how many bags are you burning each day? Maxed out, that stove should be burning more than 3 bags per day.

 

[St_Earl]

it has to be a combination of other factors. the quad should easily heat that amount of space (the 1200 sq. feet you mentioned).
and probably a good deal more if the space is insulated and doesn't have massive infiltration issues.

the principle of a fan blowing cool air along the floor toward the stove is pretty much universally effective.
i have a fan blowing into the stove room from immediately outside in the dining room.
but many use a floor level fan in the far room(s) blowing toward the stove.

i then have a vornado in the living (stove) room room doorway up high and another in the arch between the kitchen and dining room.
the floor fan blows in and displaces the hot air (quite effectively) back out under the doorway. the vornados catch that warm air and relay it to the back bedroom.
when it's not much below freezing, i don't need the floor fan. and we run a variation of speeds and on or off with the vornados.
we actually have pretty good fine tuning capability over the heat throughout the house.

the principal is the same, a convection loop, but there are many variations used by people depending on their layout and such.

i heat my 925sq. foot home exclusively with the heatilator PS50. it's the budget cousin of the quad, and it has a flat plate "heat exchanger"
the real quads have real heat exchangers, so i would bet money that CB1200 is capable of heating your home given the right conditions.
we've got near to 20 below here this year and have had no problem.
and i even draw some heat off to the basement via a vent. i keep it at a minimum of 45f on even the coldest of nights and run between 45 and 50 degrees.
the only time i run the oil furnace is to keep it ready. a few times a year just to be sure it still works.

insulation and sealing is the first and best bang for the buck measure.
then distribution of the heat.
then if you haven't decided to scrap the whole thing, you may want to look into an outside air kit to supply combustion air directly from outside instead of sucking it in through every leak in the house while at the same time also sucking in air you've already heated
and sending it all up the stack.

the quad OAK isn't the cheapest one out there. and it also needs a 90 degree connection inside the stove to the inlet.
some folks may mistakenly just hook the oak hose to the hole in the back of the stove and not finish the connection inside.
that leaves a gap in the air supply path.
it's easily possible to fabricate the little collar the kit comes with and then just use hardware store parts to build the oak. i know one guy who did it w/ a drill and jb weld. which was how i imagined i'd do it.
in the end i just found the best deal i could and went the ebay route.

but these are details you can cover when the time comes.
it took me a while to get my system down just right. and the first winter we didn't have an oak. but we still did ok.

you'll find good advice and experience here as you go.
best wishes for good results and welcome to the forum : )

*oh yeah. most people keep the stove running constantly when it's cold.
once everything is heated up, it takes less to maintain that than it does to warm it up from cold.
the harmans and some other stoves have sophisticated controls that maintain desired heat in several different ways. but with the simple controls on my stove(which is basically the same as the CB1200) i just switch between the three settings as needed.
but once your walls are heated up and all the contents of the house are saturated, it's just a matter of matching the rate of loss of the house.

 

[Pellet-King]

For all the money your wasting buying a pellet stove, pellets, now insulation you could of bought alot of oil

 

[smg64ct]

I have a 2000 sq ft house not that old open lay out. My classic bay didn't do that great of a job, I would have to put the electric heat on to help. I bought a mount Vernon that heats up the house with ease and I moved the classic bay to the basement it works well down their.

 

[moey]

For all the money your wasting buying a pellet stove, pellets, now insulation you could of bought alot of oil

Cost of home ownership. You could live in your car in a commuter lot as well a lot cheaper.

 

[ironpony]

insulation and draft sealing.
I heat 4600 sq ft, new construction with a Harman Invincible RS, yes runs continuous on high, burn 2.5 bags a day but it works

 

[1RADGUY]

Welcome to this forum, 1RadGuy. The best energy conserving thing I have done since putting my Quad pellet stove in service was to join this message board group. You will find many fellow Quad owners on this board with the 'pellet passion' to help you with your stove and your 'mission'. So, to answer your perhaps rhetorical question, no, you didn't spend 'thousands for nothing'. It will just take looking at each component of your 'energy use equation' and modifying them as best you can, when you can. Granted, that can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but try not to get frustrated - everyone on this board has 'been there done that'. You came to the right place to get some help.

The next best energy conserving effort we have done to date was to have an energy audit done on our house (costs about $250 from what I recall).They set up a huge calibrated negative pressure fan to pull air out of the house to determine where the air leaks were, and they did infrared heat loss measurements throughout the whole house to see where we could best prioritize our insulation and heat retention efforts. I would highly recommend that to anyone who wants to reduce their carbon foot print.

I have a smaller sized Quadrafire, the Castile, that puts about 30,000 BTU's vs the Classic Bay 1200's 47,000 BTU output, and we are heating about the same sq footage as you in our drafty 1870's New England farmhouse, also with no insulation in the walls and maybe a foot of batting insulation in the ceilings. So something doesn't seem right with your stove's heat output. What type / quality of pellets are you burning? Do you keep the stove clean to get the most efficiency out of it ? Do you have an OAK - outside air kit, to minimize your cold air drafts being pulled in by the stoves combustion blower? All these things determine your stoves relative heat output. Use the search option at the upper right corner of the page and you will find hours and hours of informative reading on each of these topics.

My Quad can keep the main part of our farmhouse, which has 2 floors, in the low to mid 70's when our Vermont Castings wood stove is helping out from the far end of the house, even when temps are in the single digits here in Maine. Typically the oil furnace only kicks in when it is windy and below zero and we haven't kept the wood stove stoked overnight, then typically only in the pre-dawn to dawn hours when outside temps are the coldest, and before the sun comes up to help w/ some south facing solar input.

We do have to move some air around to help distribute the heat, (rparker is spot on, pellet stoves are really only an alternative fuel source space heater), using floor fans blowing the cold air towards the room the pellet stove is in, which works better IMO than using the overhead ceiling fans. We close off a downstairs rooms we don't regularly use, and shrink film our windows to help with heat retention, spray foamed the sills and granite fieldstone foundation joints to minimize drafts from the basement, etc. So there is no single 'magic bullet' fix to reducing 'dino oil' dependency, but all the little things done in consort has saved us a bunch of money.

Over 6 winters now we have burned an avg of 4 tons of pellets and maybe 1 1/2 cords or so of firewood per year. But that certainly beats the avg of 1200 gallons of fuel oil the couple who owned our farmhouse before us burned over a winter. We burn maybe 150 gallons of fuel oil a year now, mostly to heat our hot water, and to supplement the pellet stove in cold winters like this has been. So our pellet stove and related insulating efforts have payed us back in value hundreds of times over.

 

[1RADGUY]

I have 2 insulation contractors coming today. I have talked to my wife about an energy audit. I believe my power supplier helps out with the cost. We burn Turmans pellets. Just started our 4th ton early in the week. We run fan on high and heat on highest setting. Have never heard of OAK, so I will have to look into that. I guess one of my problems is that I talked to 3 seperate dealers, and all of them said that it would be no problem to heat the lower level of my house with the Quad 1200. That's the part that gets me.

 

[1RADGUY]

Are you running the stove on its highest settings, and how many bags are you burning each day? Maxed out, that stove should be burning more than 3 bags per day.

Yes, the stove fan runs on high and the temp setting is on high. I clean the stove every 3-4 days. Burn Turmans and are using 2 to 3 bags a day. Just started to use our 4th ton earlier this past week.

 

[1RADGUY]

I have a Quad CB1200 and know what you are talking about. Also have an old house with poor insulation and sealing. One thing to remember is that a pellet stove is a space heater, it is not meant to heat an entire house. The savings I get with the stove are when temps are cold (20 - 40 degrees) but not frigid. When it gets down into the teens and below, I do wind up burning oil but it is what I expected. If you are expecting it to replace a Fisher Papa Bear ( a beast of a heater), you will be discouraged. I am working on insulating and sealing but still don't expect to heat the whole place with my stove when the temps plummet.

Replacing the Fisher is a big problem. My wife grew up with that and always expected it to be 85 degrees in the house. Now the pellet stove tries to keep it at 74 and my wife is freezing. But the stove can't keep 74. Now she's really freezing and unhappy. Unhappy wife = unhappy life!

 

[1RADGUY]

For all the money your wasting buying a pellet stove, pellets, now insulation you could of bought alot of oil

Thanks for the encouraging words! I'm trying to make it work. But I would use 3 tanks of oil in a year without the wood stove. $3.50 a gallon at a 250 gallon tank is $875. 3 full tanks is $2600. Can't do that year after year,. With the help of this forum, I'll figure it out. Lots of great people and ideas here. And yes, that was sarcasm about the encouraging words!

 

[1RADGUY]

Welcome to this forum, 1RadGuy. The best energy conserving thing I have done since putting my Quad pellet stove in service was to join this message board group. You will find many fellow Quad owners on this board with the 'pellet passion' to help you with your stove and your 'mission'. So, to answer your perhaps rhetorical question, no, you didn't spend 'thousands for nothing'. It will just take looking at each component of your 'energy use equation' and modifying them as best you can, when you can. Granted, that can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but try not to get frustrated - everyone on this board has 'been there done that'. You came to the right place to get some help.

The next best energy conserving effort we have done to date was to have an energy audit done on our house (costs about $250 from what I recall).They set up a huge calibrated negative pressure fan to pull air out of the house to determine where the air leaks were, and they did infrared heat loss measurements throughout the whole house to see where we could best prioritize our insulation and heat retention efforts. I would highly recommend that to anyone who wants to reduce their carbon foot print.

I have a smaller sized Quadrafire, the Castile, that puts about 30,000 BTU's vs the Classic Bay 1200's 47,000 BTU output, and we are heating about the same sq footage as you in our drafty 1870's New England farmhouse, also with no insulation in the walls and maybe a foot of batting insulation in the ceilings. So something doesn't seem right with your stove's heat output. What type / quality of pellets are you burning? Do you keep the stove clean to get the most efficiency out of it ? Do you have an OAK - outside air kit, to minimize your cold air drafts being pulled in by the stoves combustion blower? All these things determine your stoves relative heat output. Use the search option at the upper right corner of the page and you will find hours and hours of informative reading on each of these topics.

My Quad can keep the main part of our farmhouse, which has 2 floors, in the low to mid 70's when our Vermont Castings wood stove is helping out from the far end of the house, even when temps are in the single digits here in Maine. Typically the oil furnace only kicks in when it is windy and below zero and we haven't kept the wood stove stoked overnight, then typically only in the pre-dawn to dawn hours when outside temps are the coldest, and before the sun comes up to help w/ some south facing solar input.

We do have to move some air around to help distribute the heat, (rparker is spot on, pellet stoves are really only an alternative fuel source space heater), using floor fans blowing the cold air towards the room the pellet stove is in, which works better IMO than using the overhead ceiling fans. We close off a downstairs rooms we don't regularly use, and shrink film our windows to help with heat retention, spray foamed the sills and granite fieldstone foundation joints to minimize drafts from the basement, etc. So there is no single 'magic bullet' fix to reducing 'dino oil' dependency, but all the little things done in consort has saved us a bunch of money.

Over 6 winters now we have burned an avg of 4 tons of pellets and maybe 1 1/2 cords or so of firewood per year. But that certainly beats the avg of 1200 gallons of fuel oil the couple who owned our farmhouse before us burned over a winter. We burn maybe 150 gallons of fuel oil a year now, mostly to heat our hot water, and to supplement the pellet stove in cold winters like this has been. So our pellet stove and related insulating efforts have payed us back in value hundreds of times over.

If it's not much of a problem ,can you explain how an OAK works? I've looked on the site, but most people talk about having one or the need for one, not so much of how it works. Thanks! Also, your comment about floor fans over ceiling fans. I don't need scientific stuff, but why do you think they are better? And do others in the community feel the same? I appreciate everyones help. I want to enjoy my pellet stove, not hate it!

 

[St_Earl]

the OAK is simply a hole in the wall with a hose that feeds air directly into the stove. thus shifting the draw to the outside air rather than pulling air in from the living space and subsequently from the outside through any leak in the house as well and pulling in for combustion, air that has already been heated and blowing that out the stack.

i don't think ceiling fans are worse per se than floor fans.
it would just be a matter of seeing how best they could work together.

but if you are blowing cool air toward the stove down low, the convection loop created will replace that with warm air up high.
i have kind of a narrow maze of an air path from the back bedroom to the stove room. so instead of placing a fan in the back room blowing toward the stove, i went for one directly outside the stove room. then i use vornados up high to shoot the displaced warm air directly back into the back bedroom.
the difference between trying to push/suck the hot air out of the stove room with the fan pointing away and the effect of pointing the fan in and letting the cold air displace the warmer is quite dramatic.
when it gets really cold, the floor fan is an essential part of my system.

when i turn the floor fan on, i can feel the warm air pour out under the lintel of the doorway and into the dining room.
a small fan running on low will do this. as a matter of fact it works better on low than on high. running on a lower speed helps keep the cool air at floor level and leaves the air path up high clear for the hot air to follow that part of the loop.

i can only guess, but i think if you're running ceiling fans it will be better to do the floor fan thing in rooms that are further from the stove and don't have the ceiling fans. not sure how the two forces would interact. but trail and error will show.

 

[DMKNLD]

If it's not much of a problem ,can you explain how an OAK works? I've looked on the site, but most people talk about having one or the need for one, not so much of how it works. Thanks! Also, your comment about floor fans over ceiling fans. I don't need scientific stuff, but why do you think they are better? And do others in the community feel the same? I appreciate everyones help. I want to enjoy my pellet stove, not hate it!

X2 with what St Earl posted - he's got it 'dialed'. Every house will have a unique convective air flow pattern through it depending on floor plan, predominant wind direction, amount and type of insulation, how air tight it is, day vs night, etc.

So most of this stuff is tangential experience and 'educated speculation'. Move a cheapo digital thermometer around your pellet stove room and throughout the house while experimenting with the floor fan vs ceiling fan, ceiling fan blowing down vs pulling up, door frame fan blowing out vs blowing in, etc, and see what works best for you and your system.. That's a good part of the *fun* of pellet stove ownership, particularly for those who have a disinclination towards the 'set it and forget it' type mentality, and what works for one person's stove or house may not work for yours, but the info is all good none the less........

"Your mileage may vary" is perhaps the mantra most commonly preached on this forum.

 

[1RADGUY]

the OAK is simply a hole in the wall with a hose that feeds air directly into the stove. thus shifting the draw to the outside air rather than pulling air in from the living space and subsequently from the outside through any leak in the house as well and pulling in for combustion, air that has already been heated and blowing that out the stack.

i don't think ceiling fans are worse per se than floor fans.
it would just be a matter of seeing how best they could work together.

but if you are blowing cool air toward the stove down low, the convection loop created will replace that with warm air up high.
i have kind of a narrow maze of an air path from the back bedroom to the stove room. so instead of placing a fan in the back room blowing toward the stove, i went for one directly outside the stove room. then i use vornados up high to shoot the displaced warm air directly back into the back bedroom.
the difference between trying to push/suck the hot air out of the stove room with the fan pointing away and the effect of pointing the fan in and letting the cold air displace the warmer is quite dramatic.
when it gets really cold, the floor fan is an essential part of my system.

when i turn the floor fan on, i can feel the warm air pour out under the lintel of the doorway and into the dining room.
a small fan running on low will do this. as a matter of fact it works better on low than on high. running on a lower speed helps keep the cool air at floor level and leaves the air path up high clear for the hot air to follow that part of the loop.

i can only guess, but i think if you're running ceiling fans it will be better to do the floor fan thing in rooms that are further from the stove and don't have the ceiling fans. not sure how the two forces would interact. but trail and error will show.

Thanks for the info. I will try a small fan and see how that affects temperature. I'll post back soon. Also just had 1st insulation guy look at house. Yeah, it needs some insulation help. Maybe the problem is insulation and air flow after all!

 

[1RADGUY]

X2 with what St Earl posted - he's got it 'dialed'. Every house will have a unique convective air flow pattern through it depending on floor plan, predominant wind direction, amount and type of insulation, how air tight it is, day vs night, etc.

So most of this stuff is tangential experience and 'educated speculation'. Move a cheapo digital thermometer around your pellet stove room and throughout the house while experimenting with the floor fan vs ceiling fan, ceiling fan blowing down vs pulling up, door frame fan blowing out vs blowing in, etc, and see what works best for you and your system.. That's a good part of the *fun* of pellet stove ownership, particularly for those who have a disinclination towards the 'set it and forget it' type mentality, and what works for one person's stove or house may not work for yours, but the info is all good none the less........

"Your mileage may vary" is perhaps the mantra most commonly preached on this forum.

Thanks for the confirmation. Every little bit helps!