There ya go Begreen, there are thousands of those still in use, which means the market may support the cost of the UL listing. Wonderful idea, now we need someone to pick up the ball and run with it. My idea for retro kits was each stove would have a precision built kit that would fit perfectly every-time and be pre-tuned at the factory to work in that combustion chamber. That assures it works every-time so the tech support calls would be mitigated somewhat.Thanks Jason for your efforts to clean up stoves. It would be interesting to see this technology replace the guts of the notorious VC downdraft stoves. If it is simpler and more reliable it could bring back these classic American beauties with new life.
We have been selling Hearth products a long time now and I think I have a pretty good idea of my market to the North American Consumer, (as painless as possible and we want it yesterday!.......) I can not tell you how many hours I have spent talking to folks who can't figure out how to put the firebrick back in, after they just removed it less than an hour ago to move the stove into the house. So we know on a combustion system in the hands of someone like that......would turn into many many hours on the phone trying to explain how it goes together. Plug and Play is the only way.
Jason's current kit design he sells requires modifications be made to the stove and the Intensifire itself to get it to work. The kit contains a SS Tube of a specific dia based on what your doing and a ceramic 3 piece nozzle system that is assembled in such a way to concentrate the combustion gases into the tube so that they are consumed by the intense heat and vaporized, much the way Bio Waste and other Bio Hazards are disposed via intense incineration. Then there is the issue of tuning it to burn properly which as I witnessed several times can take hours, days, even weeks of messing around with fitting and modifying the stove so it gets enough combustion air. I heard about some of the customers Jason has worked with, he has far more patience than I do and his understanding of how it works is from his thousands of hours of playing around with the idea. He is also a one man operation with very low overhead, his passion for the product is what makes him tick, he could talk about it all day, its his baby.
Teaching my team to be able to troubleshoot and tune the Intensifire in any woodstove ever made is a very daunting task. Easy for Jason, because of the thousands of hours he has invested into this project thus far.....but what is in his head, is in his head, on the other-side of the planet. My ability to clone him and stick him in my office to manage all those calls is limited.
Our goal is happy customers and hopefully cleaner air as well.