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."
Dusty Henderson had no experience in bringing an innovative product to market, but when he saw a chance to do so, he took it.
After running through rounds of testing and receiving a patent, the 509-1 Optimum vertical-burning stove became available to consumers in January of this year.
Henderson says the company has sold 67 stoves this year. Stoves are priced at between $3,300 and $3,800 each, which puts stove sales for this year at between $221,000 and $254,000.
Courtesy photo Gary, left, and Dusty Henderson, showcasing their Presto Log Burning Stove, won the award for “Best New Marketable Product of the Year” at the HPBA Hearth Patio and BBQ Show show in Atlanta in March of 2017.
The world’s first Presto Log Burning Stove, developed here in North Idaho, is offered at 509 Fabrications, opening Monday at 6512 W. Seltice Way on the west side of Post Falls.
Invented by Frank Reed of Hayden and developed by Dusty and Gary Henderson, the stove burns just one piece of wood at a time and can burn all night on one load of fuel. The Hendersons have built and developed prototypes over the last few years and have filed patents and tested them with the EPA to sell them in the U.S. and Canada.
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.
