Quadrafire No Draft & Lots of Smoke

[Logs 2 Ashes]

I had my Quadrafire 4100i for 19 years. I burn wood continuously through every cold fall, winter & spring day, consuming about 7 cords of hard wood a year. Every year the thick gauge stainless steel flue liner is cleaned by local Chimney Sweeps. The only maintenance, other than cleaning, was replacing a door seal, replacing the insulating blanket and occasionally replacing cracked / worn fire bricks. A fantastic stove all around...
Then just the other day I couldn’t start a fire, I smoked out my house trying to get kindling to burn and realized I had no draft.
Long - story - short - The problem was the insulating blanket / mat above the firebricks on the top of the burn chamber got vacuum-sucked up against the stove flange connecting to the flue liner and blocked any smoke from rising up & out the chimney.
I disassembled the top section & rotated the blanket / mat around & now it works just fine…
What caused it? I don't know... The proof was a bowl shaped impression when the insulating blanket / mat was removed.
It's a dirty job but somebody had to do it [me} !
Has this happened to you?

 

[savageactor7]

We burned all winter long without incident then in the summer the wife decided she wanted to burn a few papers for security reasons...

...just as you described all because of blanket failure.

At first I suspected the chimney, it's real easy to mirror our chimney from the basement so that revealed a clean chimney.

 

[begreen]

I'm not a fan of anything loose on top of the baffle. It's too easy to bunch up toward the rear of the stove.

 

[Logs 2 Ashes]

I'm not a fan of anything loose on top of the baffle. It's too easy to bunch up toward the rear of the stove.

I forgot to mention, when I rotated the insulating blanket / mat, I purposely cut a 6 to 8 inch slot in the blanket / mat.
My thoughts were if it did get sucked up again, the slot would pass air and prevent it from getting vacuum locked against the stove flange...

 

[davo1028]

My Drolet insert has a small disk weight on the baffle blanket to prevent this. Maybe that would be worth a purchase, it's just a weighted 6 inch disk, ceramic I believe.

 

[Logs 2 Ashes]

My Drolet insert has a small disk weight on the baffle blanket to prevent this. Maybe that would be worth a purchase, it's just a weighted 6 inch disk, ceramic I believe.

Thanks!
I was considering something to that extent also.

 

[MongoMongoson]

The first time I cleaned my dad's chimney after he got his new stove (this was quite some time ago) installed, I thought some parts were missing. It was a Quadrafire with the blanket sitting loose on top of the baffle. It seemed weird. I remember looking in the manual and seeing a note about making sure the blanket is sitting on top of the baffle correctly. Still seems weird.

His Quadrafire does burn well, and I would have liked to have seen a Quadrafire 5700 before we bought our PE Summit, but the dealer was closed down due to COVID.

The Summit is working out for us.

 

[bholler]

I forgot to mention, when I rotated the insulating blanket / mat, I purposely cut a 6 to 8 inch slot in the blanket / mat.
My thoughts were if it did get sucked up again, the slot would pass air and prevent it from getting vacuum locked against the stove flange...

Many quads had a cut out in the back under the flue to avoid this. Other stoves used strips of metal or even the round piece left when they cut the hole for the exhaust