Start Your Wood Stove the Easy Way with our Digital App

A few years back I had a pretty typical wood burning stove. My wife and I loved the fire, we loved burning wood, but boy was it a pain to start.

Starting a Fire in a Wood Stove the Old Way:

Our old wood stove was impossible to start and filled the room with smoke. Sound familiar?

In our old wood stove, a brand that shall not be named, getting a fire going felt like a secret ritual.

1. Load the wood.
2. Open the bypass and the damper.
3. Make a careful cradle with kindling and copious amounts of newspaper.
4. Strike a match to light the newspaper.
5. Match goes out.
6. Strike another match.
7. Actually light the newspaper.
8. Shut the door halfway and back up rubbing your eyes because smoke is now filling the room.
9. The fire goes out leaving half of the newspaper unburned.
10. Strike another match and try again.
11. Add more newspaper and kindling.
12. Crack the door a little wider.
13. Finally get a fire going, shut the door, and come back ten minutes later to realize the fire has gone out again.
14. Strike another match.
15. Give up and use a propane blowtorch to light every last piece of wood.
16. Latch the door a full hour after you started.

We liked fire enough to go through this ritual almost every winter morning. It wasn’t fun spending an hour on my knees with watering eyes, poking and prodding a fire in a cold house—all before coffee. I knew that there had to be a better way. Catalyst, MF Fire’s smart wood burning stove, is that better way.

An easy to start wood stove

With the Catalyst wood stove all you need to do is Load it, Light it, and Lock it^TM. From there, our smart burning technology takes over and you can enjoy a beautiful fire in only three minutes. In our video below I build a fire in Catalyst to show you how easy it is.

The problem with traditional wood stoves is airflow. In the early stages of burning the fire needs a lot of air to keep the fire going. But in a typical wood stove, you need a big fire before the stove starts to draft well – to really pull air through the fire. For the fire to get enough airflow in those early stages you need to have the damper all the way open and usually keep the door open too. But letting fire burn like this is dangerous and the leading cause of the 22,000 chimney fires in the U.S.A. each year. With Catalyst, we’ve fixed this problem by directly controlling airflow.

Catalyst is the first wood stove that can be controlled with your smart phone or tablet.

Catalyst is an automated wood stove, eliminating the need for you to constantly adjust to achieve an ideal flame. We do this by using our patent pending TurboStart^TM turbofan to drive airflow throughout the stove when and where it is needed. When you open the door to build a fire in Catalyst, our smart sensors sense that you are about to build a fire. The turbo fan kicks on to deliver air to your growing flame and to keep smoke inside the stove, instead of filling your room.

As the fire grows, Catalyst watches carefully, adjusting the airflow as needed and working to heat your home to the room temperature as set by our Catalyst smart app. Even better, Catalyst’s automation helps you get the most out of every fire boasting a smart efficiency of 90%.

Building a fire in a wood stove shouldn’t be hard. With Catalyst, it isn’t. To learn more about the Catalyst automated wood stove click here or subscribe to our newsletter for more updates.