The stove is so novel that the EPA can’t figure out whether to call it a wood stove or a pellet stove. That’s because it’s neither—or both—depending on how you look at it.

The stove burns logs that are pressed out of sawdust. The logs are automatically fed by a gravity system one after the other. There is no auger, which all pellet stoves have, but the stove achieves consistently high efficiency and low emissions that no wood stove can get. It's the first one of its kind on the market, and the EPA and the entire stove industry doesn’t quite know what to call it yet.

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A fabrication company in State Line is making a new stove that can burn more efficiently and meet strict Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines, and it just might be able to beat out international competitors in a wood stove design challenge in Washington D.C. this fall.

The Optimum stove, made by 509 Fabrication right on the Idaho border, was invented by a friend of the company's owners in Hayden, Idaho, several years ago.

"It’s more like a wood stove than a pellet stove, but it still burns biofuel," says Dusty Henderson, who owns 509 Fab with his father Gary. "Frank Reed built and designed the first model. He had it in his shop. He kind of did it on a dare that somebody told him you couldn’t burn one piece of wood at a time."

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