BEST Outdoor Wood Furnace

One of the most important things, is how the firebox is made. Most fireboxes are square or rectangular; using six flat slabs of steel and requiring 12 welds to put the firebox together. This is not good because welds are where leaks usually start. We have a round firebox, which is infinitely stronger than any square box will ever be. We only need two welds to put our firebox together; one each end to attach the end plates.

We also have grates in our furnace, which most manufacturers do not have. This allows the ashes the fall into the ash receptacle. On our furnaces we have a separate door to clean out the ashes. This can be done even when there is a raging fire in the firebox.

With all of the other models, you have to open the firebox door to clean out the ashes. The other manufacturers wrongfully claim that you can open the firebox door and clean out the ashes, simply by pushing the burning wood to the side. This is basically, totally untrue. It is quite difficult to push the burning logs to the side. Even if you were able to do so, I guarantee that the firebox is at least 800°°F and up to 2000°F. There is no way that you are getting anywhere close to the firebox, without burning yourself, on these other models.

Because we have an ash receptacle, we are able to put our fan in the back of the furnace. The fan blows just through the ash receptacle, and up through the grates, feeding oxygen into the bottom of the fire, just like a blacksmith's forge.

Most furnaces have a fan on the front door. You can tell this by looking at the furnace and there is usually a big black box on the front door. This is the fan and it only blows air into the side of the pile wood and not from the bottom, where it is needed. Remember, fires always burn from the bottom, which is why you normally form the wood into a teepee fashion; to get oxygen into the bottom.

We have our induction forced-air  fan in the back; blowing air through the ash receptacle and up through grates, feeding oxygen into the bottom of the fire like a blacksmith's forge.

Since we are talking about fans, it is important to know that our fan is an off-the-shelf part, that is available anywhere. Our fan, thermostat and pumps, are all off-the-shelf parts, available anywhere. We do not have any proprietary parts, like the others.

We do not have any circuit boards or computerized parts to cause problems. Most of the time, these meet an early demise due to power surges. They usually run several hundred dollars and there's no need for fancy parts like this.

Going back to our firebox, if you look at the pictures, you will see that the chimney drops down into the firebox 14 inches. This traps the heat in the furnace, instead of rushing out of the chimney, heating the outside air. There is no place for the heat to go otherwise, and so it heats the water.

Even more important than that, this traps all of the gases in the firebox as well. There is a tremendous amount of energy in gases, in the wood. All of these gases are trapped and burnt off, giving you more free energy for the same amount of wood.

There are other models that are called gasification furnaces, that do the same thing, but they use elaborate and expensive methods to burn off the gases; using computerized parts and circuit boards. The feedback that I have been getting from customers, who purchase these new gasification furnaces (from others), is that they are extremely hard to start and one started, they are very difficult to keep running. In fact it becomes a "full-time job", many have said. Their furnaces cannot burn green wood. All of the wood needs to be correctly seasoned to 20% moisture content.

In addition, these furnaces are typically $2000-$4000 more than the older, simpler furnaces which had been tried, tested and proven for 40 years (how long we have been in business).