I would suggest you hire a local chimney sweep or wood stove serviceman to look over your system. If they know what they are doing they will be able to diagnose your problem. From my experience, here are a few possible causes of your problem. New wood stoves are so efficient that not much heat goes up the flue, for this reason creating a draft is more difficult than with a fireplace or an old stove. Wood MUST be very seasoned, split small and arranged in stove to allow maximum air circulation. Large logs or unseasoned wood will always cause smoke. You mentioned a stainless liner, is it wrapped in the required insulation? This is one step of stove installation that is often left off but very important. You also should make sure that no venting appliances are running until a good draft is created. Clothes dryers, gas furnaces, kitchen/bathroom fans all compete for air with your stove. You can read more about issues like this in the link provided. As for the "tinking" sound. This is common on Cast Iron Wood Stoves. Especially the Quadrafire brand. Cheap cast iron from China is cheaply assembled with screws and furnace cement. There is no welds on these stoves. The Cast iron expands and contracts and the noise will just get worse over the years. Hope this answers your questions! Here is a link that might be useful: Wood Stove Info

We have a quadra-fire free standing stove , the Castile, For our 2nd year. I have had no problems with it at all. This is our 2nd pellet stove, we had an avalon in our other house. I like this one much better. It seems to burn cleaner. I don't have to clean the pellet pipe only once or twice a season and that's with a pellet brush and a shop vac. The unit controls with a thermostat. It doesn't seem to produce as much ash as the Avalon did. The only real maintainence is cleaning the ash out of the pan and vacuuming the interior every other week. I like the burn pot on this stove. It seems to burn more completely. The only thing you have to do between cleanings is scrape the bottom of the burn pot every few days to get rid of the clinkers. If you don't it might not light all the way and smoke. That is easily prevented ,just scrape it with a putty knife and open the bottom and get rid of the clinkers. Otherwise it has been trouble free.

Hi Gingy, We had a Hearthstone Phoenix installed last week. It is on the first floor of a 2 story home. We already love it, and contrary to what Kristine-7 said, heat does travel horizontally as well as vertically. The heat does travel better upstairs than through the first floor due to particular details of our layout. But our thermostat, which is not in a place where the heat is travelling to quite as vigorously, and is down a hallway and around 2 corners from the stove, registers over 70 on days the stove is going. It is warmer than that upstairs in all the rooms where we leave the doors open. Our house is over 1500 sq. ft., maybe 1700 or more depending how you measure (some measure outside the house, some inside, etc.) The Phoenix is certainly adequate to heat our whole house. One thing I have noticed, the basement is colder now without the furnace running. Might need to do something about that in the dead of winter. We looked at the Heritage model a lot, decided the Phoenix was built better. We were also taken with the masonry types, but the installation was daunting. If you are building a new house then that would probably be a lot easier for you. We found a place in Canada that had nice ones in several colors, Faber King ceramic tile stoves. We were leaning towards that, but it is hard to find a good installer except those who work for fireplace stores, and they only install the ones they sell, the ones we talked to. We are thinking about getting a fancy thermostat that can make the furnace fan run when the gas furnace isn't on, but so far the whole house heats pretty well with no special effort. Our stove cost about $2K and the installation with all the pipes and so on was the same amount, so it was pretty pricey to this cheap soul. But we wanted a professional installation on something involving hot fire! Of course it costs more to send the pipe through 2 stories and an attic, but we wanted the stove centrally located in the house, so didn't go for the one room off by itself that has no upper story. As for safety around small kids, we built a raised hearth, the top of which is 28 inches off the ground. With the 16 inches back that the stove needs to be from the front of the hearth, that would make it hard for a small kid to reach. We don't have kids, we raised it so that we don't strain our backs so much and the fire is easier to see, but it is also a safety features when friend's toddlers come over. Good luck. Our only problem so far is getting a burn time as long as advertised. Marcia

Kats, You might want to look at the thermal mass radiant stoves made by Fred Seton in Montana. They are big stoves which have a considerable amount of refractory material in them for thermal mass and cleaner burning. We were interested in his newer stove with what he calls the Turbo top which has a circuitous smoke path with an afterburner like those found in masonry heaters or tile stoves. These are essentially 'portable' masonry heaters to an extent. My wife wasn't crazy about the looks but I know you can get his stoves with tiles on the outside. We were looking to put soapstone tiles on both for looks and for more mass. This might work for you. I only wish we could get some of the European stoves like the Topolino which is another thermal mass stove which is more or less portable but with excellent styling and looks. Rika and Max Blank are other European stovemakers with droolworthy products but no North American distributors. Here is a link that might be useful: Montana Stove Company