Hi all. I'm sorry for the elementary nature of this post, but I'm very new at this.
I started burning a new Quadra Fire Castille Insert in November. I only burn it at night after I get home from work, so I've been using only about 5 pounds of pellets a day. I would drop in a half-gallon each night before I started the stove and then I'd turn the stove off before they all burned down (in other words, my hopper never really emptied itself out). I was using pellets I got at Home Depot. Everything was great until last week.
Last week I ran out of the Home Depot pellets and I bought 10 bags of a new brand of pellets at Sam's club. The pellets seem to be bigger and "harder" than the ones I was using at Home Depot. The Home Depot pellets never exceeded 3/4" in length and crumbled easily when pressed. These others sometimes get up to 1" or 1.25" and don't crumble as easily.
Now, my stove sometimes stops feeding pellets. Sometimes I fire up the stove and no pellets are fed to ignite the fire. I don't even hear the feed mechanism making any effort at all. I have to remove most of the pellets from the hopper and hit reset every few minures for about 10-15 minutes total and then it randomly begins to operate.
Once I get it lit, it operates normally for a while and then the pellets just stop pouring out. I can hear the feed mechanism trying to deliver the pellets every 6 seconds but none fall into the burner. It sounds like it's trying and trying to feed pellets, and the efforts happen more and more quickly over time, and then the unit shuts down after the fire dies.
If we remove most of the pellets from the hopper by hand (which is a major pain since this is an insert and it's tough to reach down on there) the problem seems to go away temporarily. When we get to the point where's there's about a half-gallon of pellets in there, things seem to start working again. I don't know if that's because we've sufficiently jostled things around or because having a lower volume of pellets in the hopper makes some sort of difference.
Anyway, does this sound familiar to anyone? I read my manual and I see words like "bridging" which I assume means "clog." But I don't know how to stop that from happening or how to "break" a "bridge" if one occurs. I don't know how to check if my "augur" is having a problem. I really don't understand what's going on at all.
Thanks in advance for any tips.
I started burning a new Quadra Fire Castille Insert in November. I only burn it at night after I get home from work, so I've been using only about 5 pounds of pellets a day. I would drop in a half-gallon each night before I started the stove and then I'd turn the stove off before they all burned down (in other words, my hopper never really emptied itself out). I was using pellets I got at Home Depot. Everything was great until last week.
Last week I ran out of the Home Depot pellets and I bought 10 bags of a new brand of pellets at Sam's club. The pellets seem to be bigger and "harder" than the ones I was using at Home Depot. The Home Depot pellets never exceeded 3/4" in length and crumbled easily when pressed. These others sometimes get up to 1" or 1.25" and don't crumble as easily.
Now, my stove sometimes stops feeding pellets. Sometimes I fire up the stove and no pellets are fed to ignite the fire. I don't even hear the feed mechanism making any effort at all. I have to remove most of the pellets from the hopper and hit reset every few minures for about 10-15 minutes total and then it randomly begins to operate.
Once I get it lit, it operates normally for a while and then the pellets just stop pouring out. I can hear the feed mechanism trying to deliver the pellets every 6 seconds but none fall into the burner. It sounds like it's trying and trying to feed pellets, and the efforts happen more and more quickly over time, and then the unit shuts down after the fire dies.
If we remove most of the pellets from the hopper by hand (which is a major pain since this is an insert and it's tough to reach down on there) the problem seems to go away temporarily. When we get to the point where's there's about a half-gallon of pellets in there, things seem to start working again. I don't know if that's because we've sufficiently jostled things around or because having a lower volume of pellets in the hopper makes some sort of difference.
Anyway, does this sound familiar to anyone? I read my manual and I see words like "bridging" which I assume means "clog." But I don't know how to stop that from happening or how to "break" a "bridge" if one occurs. I don't know how to check if my "augur" is having a problem. I really don't understand what's going on at all.
Thanks in advance for any tips.