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Nov. 23rd, 2006 07:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThanksgiving.
I got up, fixed the fire, made coffee and the time-consuming oatmeal. (I adore the time-consuming oatmeal.) I checked my email. We're at 6:30 now. I'll get a shower, do my hair, drive up to the lodge, unload my pickup truck (aluminum window frames), load my pickup truck (firewood for brother-the-younger), fetch assorted meats to replenish the stocks of the beef fairy, drive to the greater York metro area, and proceed to not-blow-the-diet under the roof of brother-the-younger. (I'm quite pleased that the scale's under a hundred and sixty and heading in a proper and approval-worthy direction.)
In other news, the blower on my woodstove has a bad bearing as of last night. This makes it loud when I'm trying to, y'know, watch television on my laptop with its wimpy speakers. I present, for your amusement, the instructions for replacing the blower on my stove:
1. Turn off all electrical power to the insert. Remove the glass door and set aside in a safe place.
2. Remove the top right side bricks from inside the firebox, 4-#7's and 2-#2's. Then remove the rest of the side and back bricks from the right side of the 1101 insert.
Let's stop there, for a moment. This is, let us recall, for my woostove. This is what I use to heat my house. I do not run the woodstove in the summer because it makes heat and lots of it. Because I don't run the fucking stove in the summertime, there is no way I am going to notice a bearing going dead in the blower fan in the summertime. Nope. I am going to notice the fan bearing going dead when I'm actually using the damn stove, which would be during the heating season. D'oh. Now, as you might reasonably expect, when the woodstove is making heat, it gets pretty warm. The firebricks get hot and the metal gets hot and everything in the general vicinity gets hot.
If I burn a decent fire in the woodstove at night, it's still warm to the touch come morning and if I stoke it at bedtime (10 PM) and damp it down, there are very nice coals for morning (6 AM) so that I don't actually have to build a fire from ground zero. For most of the winter, barring occasions when I'm away from home for more than 24 hours, the woodstove is too hot to touch. In order to get the woodstove cool enough to take the firebrick out, there's going to have to be no heat in my house for quite a while. That's so going to suck.
Now, the blower for the stove is actually located OUTSIDE of the firebox and it is NOT hot to the touch when the fire is going. So, y'know, whose fucking bright idea was it to put the blower where it could not be accessed without having the entire stove cool to the touch? Assholes. This is poor design. Poor design, do you hear me? Poor design. They TOTALLY could have made it so that the blower could be replaced with a fucking screwdriver while the damn furnace was still warm. Totally. Fuckers.
I expected better for a four thousand dollar woodstove.
I have written them an email of customer complaint:
Last year, I purchased a Napoleon wood-burning fireplace insert stove with blower (1101, I think). I've been very pleased with this product as a whole and it does a lovely job of heating my house.
However, one of the the bearings in the blower started to go bad last night. It makes a pretty annoying racket and I'll have to get my chimney guy to fix it here directly. To see what that would entail, I cranked up the internets and read up on how to replace the fan on my woodstove. It appears, from the instructions, that the woodstove has to be fairly cool (because the firebricks have to be removed since the fan is accessed from inside the firebox cavity) in order to replace the blower unit.
I don't think that's a very good design. Honestly. I *use* my woodstove. That's what makes my house warm. I don't have a woodstove for to look nice. I don't keep it for holidays and special
occasions when I burn little bundles of wood that I bought for five dollars a pop at my local gas station. I am not that sort of user.
While I agree that my Napoleon stove is an attractive and decorative woodstove, its primary job at my house is *NOT* to help me pretend I'm living a country lifestyle while I'm ensconced in my DC townhouse. I *am* living a country lifestyle, two miles down a dirt road on five hundred acres of hardwood forest. I don't need to pretend about that. At my house, the primary job of my woodstove is to make heat and I actually expect it to do that -- every single day of the heating season.
You could have made it so that the fan was easier to get to. You could have made it so that I could replace the fan with maybe a socket driver and a screwdriver or two. I'm pretty handy with tools and if you made the quarter-round panel on the front side of the stove an access panel, a third-grader could replace the blower.
But you didn't do that. You made it so that I have to wait for the stove to cool down completely before I could replace the part most likely to need to be replaced. Not good. I expected more from a stove that (including installation) ran me four grand.
I'd also like to point out that I had my chimney guy (from whom I bought this stove) out in August to check things out and make sure everything was okay and he gave it a clean bill of health for the heating season. The blower bearing problem isn't because I failed to get regularly scheduled checkups for the stove. I know that I use my stove harder than most people you sell to and I am okay with having to replace the blower on a yearly basis. The thing I am NOT okay with is that it's damn near impossible to GET to the blower. That pretty much sucks.
Please forward this to your product designers. They need to know that this is a problem.
I got up, fixed the fire, made coffee and the time-consuming oatmeal. (I adore the time-consuming oatmeal.) I checked my email. We're at 6:30 now. I'll get a shower, do my hair, drive up to the lodge, unload my pickup truck (aluminum window frames), load my pickup truck (firewood for brother-the-younger), fetch assorted meats to replenish the stocks of the beef fairy, drive to the greater York metro area, and proceed to not-blow-the-diet under the roof of brother-the-younger. (I'm quite pleased that the scale's under a hundred and sixty and heading in a proper and approval-worthy direction.)
In other news, the blower on my woodstove has a bad bearing as of last night. This makes it loud when I'm trying to, y'know, watch television on my laptop with its wimpy speakers. I present, for your amusement, the instructions for replacing the blower on my stove:
1. Turn off all electrical power to the insert. Remove the glass door and set aside in a safe place.
2. Remove the top right side bricks from inside the firebox, 4-#7's and 2-#2's. Then remove the rest of the side and back bricks from the right side of the 1101 insert.
Let's stop there, for a moment. This is, let us recall, for my woostove. This is what I use to heat my house. I do not run the woodstove in the summer because it makes heat and lots of it. Because I don't run the fucking stove in the summertime, there is no way I am going to notice a bearing going dead in the blower fan in the summertime. Nope. I am going to notice the fan bearing going dead when I'm actually using the damn stove, which would be during the heating season. D'oh. Now, as you might reasonably expect, when the woodstove is making heat, it gets pretty warm. The firebricks get hot and the metal gets hot and everything in the general vicinity gets hot.
If I burn a decent fire in the woodstove at night, it's still warm to the touch come morning and if I stoke it at bedtime (10 PM) and damp it down, there are very nice coals for morning (6 AM) so that I don't actually have to build a fire from ground zero. For most of the winter, barring occasions when I'm away from home for more than 24 hours, the woodstove is too hot to touch. In order to get the woodstove cool enough to take the firebrick out, there's going to have to be no heat in my house for quite a while. That's so going to suck.
Now, the blower for the stove is actually located OUTSIDE of the firebox and it is NOT hot to the touch when the fire is going. So, y'know, whose fucking bright idea was it to put the blower where it could not be accessed without having the entire stove cool to the touch? Assholes. This is poor design. Poor design, do you hear me? Poor design. They TOTALLY could have made it so that the blower could be replaced with a fucking screwdriver while the damn furnace was still warm. Totally. Fuckers.
I expected better for a four thousand dollar woodstove.
I have written them an email of customer complaint:
Last year, I purchased a Napoleon wood-burning fireplace insert stove with blower (1101, I think). I've been very pleased with this product as a whole and it does a lovely job of heating my house.
However, one of the the bearings in the blower started to go bad last night. It makes a pretty annoying racket and I'll have to get my chimney guy to fix it here directly. To see what that would entail, I cranked up the internets and read up on how to replace the fan on my woodstove. It appears, from the instructions, that the woodstove has to be fairly cool (because the firebricks have to be removed since the fan is accessed from inside the firebox cavity) in order to replace the blower unit.
I don't think that's a very good design. Honestly. I *use* my woodstove. That's what makes my house warm. I don't have a woodstove for to look nice. I don't keep it for holidays and special
occasions when I burn little bundles of wood that I bought for five dollars a pop at my local gas station. I am not that sort of user.
While I agree that my Napoleon stove is an attractive and decorative woodstove, its primary job at my house is *NOT* to help me pretend I'm living a country lifestyle while I'm ensconced in my DC townhouse. I *am* living a country lifestyle, two miles down a dirt road on five hundred acres of hardwood forest. I don't need to pretend about that. At my house, the primary job of my woodstove is to make heat and I actually expect it to do that -- every single day of the heating season.
You could have made it so that the fan was easier to get to. You could have made it so that I could replace the fan with maybe a socket driver and a screwdriver or two. I'm pretty handy with tools and if you made the quarter-round panel on the front side of the stove an access panel, a third-grader could replace the blower.
But you didn't do that. You made it so that I have to wait for the stove to cool down completely before I could replace the part most likely to need to be replaced. Not good. I expected more from a stove that (including installation) ran me four grand.
I'd also like to point out that I had my chimney guy (from whom I bought this stove) out in August to check things out and make sure everything was okay and he gave it a clean bill of health for the heating season. The blower bearing problem isn't because I failed to get regularly scheduled checkups for the stove. I know that I use my stove harder than most people you sell to and I am okay with having to replace the blower on a yearly basis. The thing I am NOT okay with is that it's damn near impossible to GET to the blower. That pretty much sucks.
Please forward this to your product designers. They need to know that this is a problem.
