Sunday, April 12, 2009

A Balmy 80F

We spent a good portion of the winter whining about the cold and feeling like the fireplace just wasn't doing the trick. We had struggled in our firebox selection, since the house was designed for an insert that didn't require full masonry. So, we ended up with this Quadra Fire, and were pretty disappointed because it didn't really heat the house up.

So, we turned to our handy technical expert to figure it out. I was ready to rip out the insert, change the framed area, and put a freestanding wood stove in, but knew that would be a lot of work and could be bad aesthetically. Well, it turns out that the Quadra Fire is designed to have a fan/blower system that takes a combination of external and internal air, runs it around the firebox in, and blows it out into the house. So, the big question was whether we could get this set up after the fact.

After several hours of consultation, including bringing Steve over to try to recall what they did when they put the fireplace in (this was, sadly, one case where none of us had in-process photos), we received good news. The fans and air ducts were all installed. All we needed to do was to get them wired to a switch so that we could turn them on. Clearly we weren't paying attention when we answered some question about the fireplace when it was being put in. Anyway, our electrician was able to carve two small holes in the wallboard to access the wiring and fish it up to a new switch. As an added bonus, the lower of the hole was turned into a new outlet, which was needed there anyway. There's no evidence other than a little pencil mark on the wall that this wasn't set up this way from the start.

We're into the often dreary, raining and cold days of April, and continue to enjoy the fireplace's efficiency. It's remarkably easy to get the house at or above 80F with an evening fire, and the heat stays long enough to keep the house above 60 well into the next day.
So, I'll take back everything bad I said about the Quadra Fire....

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home