Frequently Asked Questions

Flames from our patented 2-stage gasifier combustion technology will be visible as long as there is wood gas to release and burn. Embers to embers, you can expect up to 8 hours from Kimberly® and up to 10 hours from our Katydid™ and Krikit™ models. Even after the flames have diminished, embers will continue to release heat for. hours, until they to diminish and turn to a powdery gray ash. 

Depending on the species and the size of your last firewood oad at bedtime, you might expect to wake up to a stove that is warm to the touch with enough hot embers to make it easier to light your first fire of the morning.

All three of our Unforgettable Fire® wood stove models, which includes our Kimberly® stove, as well as our bigger models, Katydid™ and Krikit™, are designed and warranted to burn any species of locally available cordwood and do not require any special fuel. To help you select the best species of wood available in your local area, please consult our searchable Cordwood BTU chart.

Our Unforgettable Fire® wood stoves have always been manufactured within the United States. We have shipped to clients from coast to coast within the United States and Canada, parts of Europe, Mexico, and New Zealand. 

Unforgettable Fire, LLC began on the island of Vashon, located in Puget Sound, west of West Seattle, Washington. Roger Lehet, our Chief Executive Pyromaniac, eventually settled in western North Carolina, that is where we are headquartered today.

Please peruse our website to learn about how our patented 2-stage gasifier combustion technology can provide you with longer burn times save you both time and money by making the most efficient use of your locally available cordwood. 

We have shipped Unforgettable Fire® wood stoves to clients across the United States and Canada, parts of Europe, Mexico, and New Zealand, and we most happy to ship an Unforgettable Fire® wood stove to you!

As every relationship begins with a conversation, we find that a phone call is the best way for us to ask questions so as to fully understand your needs, answer your pre-sale questions, and work with you to formulate an installation game plan for your Unforgettable Fire® wood stove. 

When you purchase a wood stove from Unforgettable Fire, LLC, you are getting the time and attention of the inventor himself, who has more than 40 years experience on a roof. Before we take your money, we want to be certain that the model and location(s) that you are considering for the installation are going to provide you with a safe installation and that you will be cozy and comfortable with the model that you are choosing. This is a responsibility that we take seriously.

As time and distance prevent us from doing an on-site evaluation of your unique structure, we will need rely upon your interior-exterior photos and your measurements to help us determine what chimney components will be required for your structure. Our guidance, both before and during the installation via telephone, can ensure that your installation is done correctly the first time. 

Photos of your completed installation allow us the opportunity to do a post-installation safety inspection before you ever strike the first match. Any operation issues you may encounter down the road can usually be identified and solved with a single phone call. If necessary, we will happily replace a stove under our five year non-prorated warranty, which, by the way is one of the best warranties in the wood stove industry.

Please peruse our website to learn about how our patented 2-stage gasifier combustion technology can provide you with longer burn times save you both time and money by making the most efficient use of your locally available cordwood and contact us with your questions! 

Our Unforgettable Fire® wood stoves are priced competitively with other UL-listed and EPA tested wood stoves. When comparing one brand with another, one must always consider total installation costs, such as chimney, floor protection, installation labor, and future maintenance.

Given the increased energy costs for electricity and natural gas, your investment in an Unforgettable Fire® wood stove offers an even greater cost savings than when we released our first Kimberly® stove back in 2012. In fact, some of our clients have reported that they recouped their investment in an Unforgettable Fire® wood stove in as little as 1-2 years just from the savings of the gas and electricity bills that they replaced—or by replacing a less efficient wood stove with one of ours.

If you are up for a DIY installation of your Unforgettable Fire® wood stove, we can guide you through it by telephone. If you are not up for the challenge, then a local handyman—under our guidance by telephone—can install your wood stove for less than a professional shop. 

As our patented 2-stage gasifier combustion technology wastes far less heat up the chimney and thus keeps far more heat in your home, you can cut and split less wood for each heating season. That makes an even greater cost savings if you are buying wood.

As our chimneys are designed to be cleaned from inside the house, you can also skip the annual expense of a chimney sweep, as you can clean your own chimney. In most cases, there’s no need to get on the roof to clean your chimney with an Unforgettable Fire® wood stove in your home, or pay someone else to do it for you.

Over its lifetime, your Unforgettable Fire® wood stove will likely have returned the cost of your initial investment many times over. 

In determining which wood stove model is best for your needs, you should consider not only the heat output of the wood stove itself, but also the heat retention abilities of your structure. Other variables to consider include the following:

– Square footage and ceiling height of your structure
– Thickness of your walls and height of your attic
– Local Climate and weather conditions such as wind speed, etc.
– Insulation quality and R-value
– Window quality, and the size and number of windows
– Local climate and winter weather conditions, such as wind speed
– Location of your wood stove within your structure
– Air movement and humidity levels within your structure
– Wood species and wood moisture content of your firewood
– Purpose—will your wood stove be your sole source of heat, or additional heat?
– How many BTU’s would you need if no other heat source was available?

Other than a re-designed grate/ash dump cover and improved performance in the Kimberly® 2.0, the Kimberly® 1.0 and Kimberly® 2.0 wood burning stoves are identical. As a result, the improved air control from the re-designed grate/ash dump cover provides our Kimberly® 2.0 clients with even longer burn times and even cleaner emissions output than produced from our original Kimberly® 1.0. Ash removal in the 2.0 is also much easier.

Our re-designed grate/ash dump cover also eliminated any of the occasional damper control issues that a few of our clients, unfortunately experienced, with our original Kimberly® 1.0.

Unforgettable Fire, LLC will continue to offer replacement grate/ash dump covers for sale to our valued Kimberly® 1.0 clients into the foreseeable future as the grate/ash dump covers for Kimberly® 1.0 and Kimberly® 2.0 stove are not interchangeable. Our Kimberly® Owner’s Manual includes the exploded view of both grate/ash dump cover designs.

The performance of any wood stove is influenced by its chimney, its fuel, and its operator. To avoid smoke escaping the door of your wood stove, always read and follow the manufacturer’s installation instructions for your wood stove and chimney. Always burn wood that is 20% moisture content or less, which is the wood stove industry standard. Always fully open the damper handle before opening its door to avoid flashback of smoke and flames.

Every wood stove that has been UL-listed by Underwriter’s Laboratories, including the UL-Listed wood stoves manufactured by Unforgettable Fire, LLC, undergo a “spill test” as part of the UL-testing protocols. The “spill test” measures the amount of smoke that escapes from the door when the door of a wood stove is opened.

The UL-listing from Underwriters Laboratories is your assurance that a wood stove meets or exceeds the allowable spillage threshold. When burning adequately seasoned firewood of 20% moisture content or less inside a wood stove with a properly installed and functioning chimney, with an operator who opens the damper handle prior to opening the door, the amount of wood smoke that escapes from a UL-Listed wood stove, such as those manufactured by Unforgettable Fire, LLC, should be virtually undetectable.

There’s nothing that beats the ambiance of bacon sizzling in a cast iron skillet on top of your Unforgettable Fire® wood burning stove while sipping your first cup of coffee on a cold winter morning. Our patented 2-step gasifier combustion technology creates higher stovetop temperatures than do other wood stove brands, so your food can cook more quickly.

Clients have proudly emailed photos of their brownies, breads, meats, etc. baked on top of their Unforgettable Fire® wood stove using a cast iron Dutch oven that they already owned. Some of our clients have taken things a step further by drilling hole in the top of their Dutch oven to accommodate a thermometer.

While we appreciate cast iron as a material for its ability to heat food evenly, it is not necessary to use cast iron for cooking or baking on our Unforgettable Fire® wood stoves, as cooking vessels made from other materials can also provide you with a hot and delicious meal.

Of our three wood burning models, our Kimberly® wood stove has the hottest cook stove top, easily reaching 1,000 – 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Cooking on a Kimberly® stove can be compared to cooking on a 20,000 BTU gas burner. Your dinner will be ready in a hurry!

Cooking on our Katydid™ wood stove can be compared to cooking with a slow cooker. Katydid™ stove top temperatures can easily reach up to 350 degrees and may go as high as 650 degrees, if you push Katydid™ on a particularly cold day. By comparison, slow cookers run around 190 degrees to around 300 degrees Fahrenheit. We find that Katydid™ is especially useful for simmering soup or baking sourdough bread in a cast iron Dutch oven.

Our Krikit™ wood burning stove offers the most stable temperature stove top temperatures of our three Unforgettable Fire® models. the Krikit™ stovetop temperatures peak around 850 degrees Fahrenheit. 

All wood stoves draft better when the chimney runs vertically through the structure’s ceiling and roof. Although some clients express concern about the possibility of a leaky roof when venting through the ceiling and roof, the use of today’s modern sealants, eliminates this concern when done according to the sealant and pipe manufacturer’s installation instructions.

Venting out the wall comes with disadvantages as heat radiating off the chimney might have been kept in the house, but is transferred outside with the pipe when exiting the wall.

Horizontal or diagonal runs of straight pipe, which must include the use of elbows, places back pressure on the inside of the chimney, which can cause difficult starts and smoke spillage when opening the door for reloading. As well, chimney costs increase because additional Class A chimney pipe will required to run along the side of the wall.

Whenever possible, always install the chimney straight through the ceiling and the roof, and not out the wall. This is true not only of our Unforgettable Fire® wood stoves, but is good practice for installing other brands, as well. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

All of our Unforgettable Fire® wood stove models are non-catalytic wood stove, relying instead on our patented 2-stage gasifier combustion technology to produce an exceptionally clean and efficient burn, rather than a catalytic element.

In catalytic wood stoves, the wood smoke flows through a coated ceramic honeycomb device, contained within the combustion chamber, allowing smoke particles to ignite and burn before they exit the combustion chamber. This technology can cause an otherwise dirty wood burner to burn clean enough to meet state and federal emissions requirements, acting much like a catalytic converter on your car.

In our opinion, catalytic stoves offer many disadvantages:

As a general rule, pellet stoves provide more consistent room temperatures than most wood stoves, which can be an advantage while you are at work or while you are sleeping. This, however, is where we believe the advantage of a pellet stove ends.

When your power goes out due to a winter storm, a pellet stove may leave you cold because most pellet stoves require electricity. Although most modern pellet stoves are also equipped with a 72 battery for back-up, the need for a battery becomes problematic if your electricity is out for a longer period of time, such as what happened to folks in western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Even gravity-fed pellet stoves offer no advantage when pellets are not available for purchase because of transportation or production issues, whereas firewood will always be locally available.

Part of the charm of a wood stove over any other heat sources is its unquestioned reliability of a wood burning stove. Yet—some modern wood stoves rely upon electricity for start-up or monitoring the moisture content of their firewood. In the absence of electricity, these wood stoves would also be rendered useless.

On the other hand, the Unforgettable Fire® wood burning stoves contain no moving parts to fail and require no electricity to start or operate. An Unforgettable Fire® wood stove in your home will keep you cozy and warm when other heating options may fail you.

Because our patented 2-stage gasifier combustion technology wastes less heat up your chimney than other wood stoves for sale today, our interior flue temperatures are much lower than chimneys connected to other wood stoves.

To overcome the possibility of unwanted condensation or drafting issues because our interior flue temperature drop too low, we use custom-manufactured insulated pellet pipe, developed exclusively for our Unforgettable Fire® wood stoves. 

As with any wood stove, the relationship between your wood stove and your chimney is much like the relationship between your heart and your lungs—each must work together in harmony or the performance of the other will suffer. For this reason we sell and warrant the performance of our Unforgettable Fire® wood stoves when they are vented with our custom-manufactured pipe.

Of greater consideration is your safety. When you purchase the chimney pipe for your Unforgettable Fire® wood stove from Unforgettable Fire, LLC, or one of its authorized dealers, you eliminate the possibility that some Big Box store employee may sell you 3-inch or 4-inch pipe that is not UL-approved for use with our wood stoves, and thus you put your structure and your life at risk for a chimney fire.

For these reasons, we sell our Unforgettable Fire® wood stoves as a package with our custom-manufactured pipe because your safety and the performance of the stoves are critical to your satisfaction.

For additional information about our unique UL-approved venting systems, please consult our owner’s manual for the model that you are considering, and contact us with your questions.