Review: Quadra-Fire Castile
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Quadra-Fire Castile - A good review for a change
I seem to be in the minority with my great experience with the Castile. We installed in November when it was 18 degrees outside with 50 knot winds and the Castile has kept my oil furnace off since then. We live on the Pacific coast in the far Northwest and we do not get really cold weather to often due to the influence of the ocean therefore our old Victorian houses are not as tight nor as well insulated as those in the Northeast. Even so at our more usual just-above-freezing temperatures the stove has no problem maintaining 75 degrees when the girlfriend needs it to do her sewing. At these temperatures we use about .8 bags a day much less when we are in the 40s. We usually keep the 1400 sq. ft. house at 60 at night and 68 during the day. We used one brand of pellets that caused a fire-pot cleaning every bag due to clinker build-up but then switched to Atlas pellets and now we clean the firepot about every three bags. The stove does make some non-objectionable noise but I dont know if it is greater than other stoves. I have heard this complaint about other stoves more often. It may be we have become used to it.
Niggling complaints: After cleaning (and therefore unplugging) we have to start the stove manually with two or three pushes of the reset button. It mentions this in the instructions, but it seems to me that some engineering should be done to take care of this. Secondly, the sheet-metal workmanship and design that holds the back wall stones is poor making it somewhat difficult to remove and re-install the stones. It took some experimentation to figure out how to do it quickly, but in my opinion this should be taken care of by a re-design. Thirdly, the pellet chamber does hold 40 pounds of pellets just barely. If and when I buy another stove it will have at least a 50 pound capacity so that full bag of pellets can be added without the stove running completely out. Over-all I am tickled with the stove that heats our house at just over half the cost of using oil and this at the most recent reduced oil price. When we moved here I sold my Corvette and bought a Prius Thinking about it, the Castile is very Prius-like.