Tradition
Imagine, being part of falling of trees, cutting trees up into firewood length, gathering up and stacking firewood, watching friends and family loading a wood stove and finally being old enough and trusted to load the stove yourself.
People talk about the tradition of heating with wood with fondness and bitterness, how great the heat feels and all the mess of handling wood and ashes. I have been around people for forty years, who heat their homes and shops with wood full time. Heating with wood is not a luxury for a lot of people, it is an affordable necessary. I have heated my home for over 20 years and again, it was out of affordability and having the experience to know that I can heat my home and shop with wood safely AND to a comfortable temperature. I own a tree company and I cut trees down for a living. I inspect trees for dead and structural issues.
I have operated old pot belly stoves all the way through a modern (box store) indoor wood furnace. It was while operating the other stoves, I realized how much wasted heat was going up the chimney and I was getting flue temperatures over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. ALSO, all that heat was a very good way of getting chimney fires.
I knew the parts of some stoves that I liked and just improved on them. I applied for a patent back in 2010. With all the stoves that I was around, all of them were cord wood appliances. So, the first heating appliance that was built with the patented design, Dakota Stove, it is a cord wood indoor furnace. A cord wood heating appliance is the easiest to make and is one of the most convenient for customers looking for no – too little moving parts (just a fan for the furnace) and no other auger type feed systems.
I own a tree company and I cut trees down for a living. I inspect trees for dead and structural issues. With all the detail to “if a tree is safe”, I started to pay attention to how different species behaved while being cut down. Some trees have a lot of moisture and other trees have little. I learned that Dakota Stove (with the patented designs) burned softer woods better than harder. A hard tree species needs more draft to burn correctly (i.e. Green Ash) and a softer tree burned longer and had more heat (i.e. Siberian Elm). And with my tree company, I sell the green ash firewood/logs and keep the elm and even cottonwood. For more than the following reason, Dakota Stove can burn what was previously poor tree species, I think that traditional stoves combustion chamber design isn’t refined enough to burn wood at a slower, more controlled rate, so woods that need a high burn rate can only be burned in a traditional stove. I have over many years heated my home and shop with bark and twigs off of trees and even scrap pine/poplar lumber. Coal and oak lumber scraps just need to much draft to burn effectively. If I can burn the same cubic foot of Oak lumber and the same volume of standing sun dried cottonwood, I will always go for the cottonwood wood, even if it weights half as much, I will get a longer burn time with more heat. Others have disagreed but more weight is not more BTU’s. I have been using my stove for more than 5 years and have experienced it and it never changes. Dakota Stove (with the patented design “Efficient Solid Fuel Burning Appliance”) operates so different than any other stove I have operated.
For additional benefit, the fan action is patented too. Stove is hot, blower/fan is on high speed, as the stove cools off the blower switches to a slower speed until it shuts off. All with no user intervention.