What Makes a Smart Wood Stove?
The word smart is thrown around a lot lately – smart cars, smart phones, smart homes. Even a few wood stoves claim to be “smart”. These stoves essentially all do the same thing. A smart stove uses simple tactics to open and close a single opening at a fixed temperature. This can be nice feature, but it isn’t much smarter than an egg timer. To truly be a smart wood stove, the wood stove can’t just repeat the same pre-programmed steps over and over again. To truly be a smart wood stove the wood stove has to learn.
Machine learning and complexity
Computers that learn, instead of just act, have been a hot topic recently. Machine learning is the process of getting computers to adapt to improve their own behavior. In the past decade, machine learning has led to self-driving cars, better medicine, and even improved TV watching (thanks Netflix!) This growth is because machine learning is particularly good at handling complex problems, problems with a lot of data or where a person’s individual circumstances are very important. A smart car can’t just drive, it needs to drive on the road you are currently on and in the traffic you are currently in. You don’t want to waste time watching a random show, you want to enjoy watching your next favorite show.
As it turns out, a wood fire is a perfect example of this sort of complex problem. Every wood stove is connected to a different chimney system, leading to different drafts on different days. Every user uses different fuel, different types of wood, in various conditions, of varying sizes and each and every person builds their fire differently. Perhaps most importantly, everyone is heating a different home and everyone has their own ideal heat. With all this complexity it’s impossible for a traditional wood stove to meet every user’s needs. Instead wood stove manufacturers design their stoves to do well in laboratory testing, and not the real world that we all live in. As a result, traditional wood stoves are hard to start, consistently over or under-heat room, and always emit more smoke in the real world than in the test lab.
A smart wood stove
Catalyst is the world’s first smart wood stove.
These problems are why we at MF Fire decided to do things differently. Catalyst is the first truly smart wood stove, the first wood burning stove to use machine learning to improve performance. Catalyst’s smart controller is continuously monitoring both the fire and your room, watching and learning exactly how your fire burns in your home. This smart stove is actively adapting to the changing conditions of your fire.
How do we do it? We began by measuring every detail of thousands of fires. We used this information to map out what we call the perfect burn. The perfect burn is a beautiful fire with no smoke, no soot, and no hassle. We designed Catalyst with this data built in, and Catalyst’s smart controller is constantly working to achieve this perfect burn.
But that isn’t all. Catalyst also learns what your perfect fire looks like. How does your fuel burn? How is your draft? How hot do you like your room and how much heat does it take to get there? The more you burn, the more Catalyst learns, adjusting to optimize and improve your experience. What does this mean for you? Better efficiency and emissions in the real world, not just the test lab, and a safe and beautiful fire in your smart stove every time.
That’s what makes a smart wood stove. If you’re ready to start burning smarter then order your Catalyst smart stove today.
