Meet the Teams: Canada’s largest stove company looks to the future in automated stoves

This post is the third in a series introducing the 12 teams participating in the 2018 Wood Stove Design Challenge in November.

By John Ackerly and Shoshana Rybeck, Alliance for Green Heat 

The SBI team 

Stove Builder International (SBI) built the innovative Osburn Volta pellet stove in 2012 and made important strides in understanding how sensors can control combustion. The Volta is unique in that it runs on direct current (DC) when all other pellet stoves run on the normal household AC current. The Volta has its own battery pack and can be easily integrated with solar power.

After seeing the announcement for the first Wood Stove Design Challenge, SBI knew that it could convert skills and lessons from the Volta to an automated cord wood stove. Their prototype was not ready for that competition, but lead engineer Nicolas Gagnon attended the 2013 event and was excited by what he saw.

Guillaume Thibodeau-Fortin, an SBI mechanical engineer, believes that wood stove automation is likely to be one of the main trends in stove manufacturing in the future. But finding the time and resources for the R&D was tricky. Guillaume started working at SBI in 2013 and knows that stove buyers are price conscious and they need to see far more value in an innovative stove than its ability to burn clean.

SBI’s location in Quebec, the French speaking part of Canada, gives them more insight and interaction with the European stove market where small, vertical stoves are more popular and where more companies are experimenting with automation. SBI’s headquarters is also not far from Montreal, North America’s largest urban area experiencing severe wood smoke issues. If there is any major North American city that needs a cord wood stove that can run reliably clean in the hands of consumers, it's Montreal.

“So we designed this for multiple reasons—not just to build a stove that operates cleanly in our customer's home. Automation also serves to improve safety, efficiency and ease of use,” Guillaume said.

The Technology

The stove is built on two radically new ideas. The first is that the stove automatically finds the optimum combustion conditions. That is a core goal of all modern combustion, whether it’s in a car, a power plant, or now, a wood stove. The second is connecting that stove to the operator to engage, inform and educate the operator to better perform his or her roles.

Final model of the stove

A key problem with appliances that need periodic operating adjustments is educating the owner. Printed owner's manuals are often not good education tools, even when they are read and reread by the operator. The SBI stove is connected via Wi-Fi to a smart phone, and Guillaume’s vision is to transfer the old fashioned owner’s manual into a far more appealing, usable and effective interface on the phone. The stove can alert the operator when it’s time to reload for example, and instructions will appear that can include a link to a video about how to tell if your wood is dry.

To automate the stove, the first step was attaching a temperature sensor, but the key was to correlate data from the thermocouple with a static pressure sensor. Utilizing an oxygen sensor could have been better but the pressure of keeping down costs steered the team away from that strategy. The team then turned to computational fluid dynamics to track and predict gas activity in the firebox. 

Efficiency and particulate matter emissions are focal points of progress for wood stove design. With better efficiency, PM is usually reduced as combustion is more complete and therefore cleaner by nature. However, the opposite condition is not necessarily true, as emissions can be reduced by adding oxygen which ultimately penalizes efficiency. SBI is paying closer attention to efficiency, which many stove manufacturers did not do in the past, but ultimately, it’s the PM level that determines if a stove can go to market.  

Electronic board in the stove

SBI’s model for increased efficiency relies on sophisticated control of the primary air inlet and a digital user interface that is connected through Wi-Fi on the user’s mobile device. The stove includes three burn rates, low, medium, and high, and is set to each level via a mobile application. To achieve the user-set burn rate, the automatic stove then takes over, using temperature and static pressure sensors to open and close the air inlets and run a motor that adds primary air in or blocks it out depending on how high combustion is and what level the user would like. While the user has control over the desired heat output, the user does not actually have the ability to change the stove's air flow to raise or lower the burn rate mechanically. The inlet for the primary air cannot be opened or closed by the operator, unless the stove is running cleanly, and if so, the stove will respond in real time to the operator’s changes. If the stove is not burning cleanly, it will first get to a cleaner burn before getting to the desired heat output set by the operator.

Setting the heat level from the comfort of your couch via their mobile device should appeal to many customers. Knowing that you don’t have to periodically check to see whether you have given the stove too much or too little air should give everyone in the house more peace of mind. If the main person who operates the stove is out, the person who adjusts the stove doesn’t have to worry about over firing, making stove smolder, or putting out the fire. The internal temperature and static pressure sensors will bring the stove to the desired heat level in the safest and cleanest manner. 

When we spoke to the President of SBI, Marc-Antoine Cantin, about the development of an automated stove at the HPBA Expo in Nashville, we were struck with how hands off he was with the R&D process on the automated stove. He gave Guillaume and his team the autonomy and support to go through the multi-year process of developing a stove that the company can stand behind. To us, this indicated a company that is big enough to support engineers working on tangential, forward looking projects and an engineering team that has built the trust of management.  

While introducing an efficient, and user-friendly automated wood stove to the market is important, SBI understands that people are first and foremost looking for an affordable and reliable form of renewable heat. When designing and creating their model, the concept of affordability was always key. One of the three head engineers on the project said, “keeping it simple is best for efficiency and the bank.” For them, the 2018 Wood Stove Challenge is giving them the platform to challenge their engineering skills in order to prepare for a cleaner wood burning future.

Contact the team

Guillaume Thibodeau-Fortin
gthibodeaufortin@sbi-international.com

Maxime Legros
mlegros@sbi-international.com

Nicolas Gagnon
ngagnon@sbi-international.com

Wood and pellet stove companies improve ratings with the Better Business Bureau; but does it matter?

In the age of Yelp, Facebook, and Angie’s List, millions of consumers still look to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) for ratings. While the BBB may have lost some of its luster, we have always urged consumers to consult it when buying a new stove.

When the Alliance for Green Heat reviewed BBB ratings for wood and pellet stove companies in 2013, most companies got A ratings, but some got Bs, one got a C and one got an F rating. As of January 2017, the same companies all have A+ ratings, except Hearth & Home Technologies, which has a B-.

Does this mean that stove companies have all become more trustworthy and reliable or that the BBB has become easier to manipulate? We think the answer lies more in the inability of the BBB to carefully assess every company. The recent ratings show the limitations of the old business rating model which the BBB was based on. However, the BBB still provides some useful information about stove companies.

First of all, look at which companies are actually accredited by BBB. Only Blaze King, Kuma, and Woodstock Soapstone are accredited, which means that they have provided written assurances that they meet BBB criteria. That doesn’t necessarily mean a lot, but the Alliance for Green Heat has independently confirmed that these three companies are among the few that consumers can trust to provide accurate data on their websites.

Second, past BBB history is still important. US Stove, for example, got an “F” in 2013, because they had “a history of violating BBB name and logo policy and falsely stated BBB Accreditation (or membership).” (See our 2013 review of BBB stove company ratings). The Alliance for Green Heat has also highlighted numerous cases of misleading or false advertising by US Stove, some of which still continues.

It’s important to understand the limitations of the BBB – and to rely on multiple sources. Unfortunately, Consumer Reports has done only a very limited review of pellet stoves and nothing on wood stoves. The Alliance for Green Heat rates some other review sites here.

We searched the BBB site for all major stove companies and found many of them there. We could find only one European stove company (Jotul) and several Canadian ones. For companies that own several brands, such as Hearth & Home Technologies, we found some of their brands, such as Harman and Vermont Castings, but could not find others, such as Quadra-fire.

Here is a chart showing BBB ratings as of January 2017:

Series 1 marks the number of resolved complaints. Series 2 marks the number of complaints that received no response. Keep in mind that this only tracks the complaints received by the BBB, and there are always many customer complaints not lodged through them. This may indicate that consumers can get better responsiveness from a stove manufacturer if they do file the complaint with the BBB.

The points are added up and a letter grade (A as the highest, F as the lowest) is assigned accordingly. In order to receive a good score, the volume of consumer complaints that are not responded to must remain low. The BBB takes into consideration whether the business makes a speedy and honest effort to fix the problem and resolve the complaint. The response of the business can mean the difference between an A and a B score. For example, as seen in the graph, HHT received 27 consumer complaints. Despite this relatively low number, HHT still got a B- because it apparently was not sufficiently responsive to some of the complaints. Click here to read a full overview of the BBB grading method.

While wood stove companies fare relatively well on BBB, some other products in the hearth industry do not. For example, Heat Surge, the Amish "miracle heater" that is heavily advertised and is also a exhibitor at HPBA trade shows currently has a B rating and hundreds of complaints filed against it. The Alliance for Green Heat has previously written about the company here.

Better Business Bureau Rates Wood Stove Companies

Few consumers probably check the Better Business Bureau before buying a wood or pellet stove or boiler.  But they should. Most wood stove experts will probably not be surprised by the rankings on the chart below. The good news for the wood stove industry is that the majority manufacturers we found on BBB received an A+ or A-. 

It’s important to understand the limitations of the BBB – and to rely on multiple sources. Unfortunately, Consumer Reports has done only a very limited review of pellet stoves and nothing on wood stoves. There is this good review of pellet stove reliability. Hearth.com is also a great resource and the Alliance for Green Heat reviews some other sites here.

The volume of complaints alone does not heavily impact a company’s grade.  Otherwise, the largest manufacturers would have the worst grades and the companies that only sold a few thousand stoves a year would have the best.  The BBB tracks consumer complaints and monitors if they have been resolved.  In their grading method, different point values are assigned to 16 weighted criteria. They include complaint volume, unanswered complaints, unresolved complaints, serious complaints, failure to address a complaint pattern and advertising review. Failure to respond to consumer complaints and to resolve them are weighted heavily.

We searched the BBB site for all major stove companies and found many of them there. We could find only one European stove company (Jotul) and several Canadian ones. For companies that own several brands such as Hearth & Home Technologies, we found one of their brands, Harman, separately listed but could not find another, Quadra-fire, for example.

* Prior to July 2013, when this blog was published, US Stove has "a history of violating BBB name and logo policy and has falsely stated BBB accreditation," according to the BBB. As of August, 2013, US Stove, "responded the BBB by removing all reference of BBB's name/logo from their website."  The BBB website still says, "There is an alert for this company."  

Series 1 marks the number of resolved complaints. Series 2 marks the number of complaints that received no response. It is promising to see that many stove manufacturers receive very few consumer complaints. Also, the complaints they do receive appear to be responded to and resolved professionally and effectively.

The points are added up and a letter grade (A as the highest, F as the lowest) is assigned accordingly. In order to receive a good score, the volume of consumer complaints that are not responded to must remain low. The BBB takes into consideration whether the business makes a speedy and honest effort to fix the problem and resolve the complaint. The response of the business can mean the difference between an A and a B score. For example, as seen in the graph, Central Boiler received 33 consumer complaints. Despite this large number, the manufacturers response and resolution of these complaints still earned it an A-. Click here to read a full overview of the BBB grading method.

Only a small fraction of consumer complaints are handled by the BBB. Usually consumers first go directly the manufacturer and only if that proves unsuccessful do consumers approach the BBB.  Instead of BBB, or in addition to it, consumers can go to their the State Attorney General’s Office. A full index listed by state is provided here. At the federal level, the Office of United States Attorneys maintains a consumer complaint file to track allegations of consumer fraud.

The BBB has been criticized for their apparent subjectivity and preferential grading of BBB accredited businesses.  It is the consistency and the transparency of the test that determines its ethical merit and credibility. The Los Angeles BBB was the branch responsible for the preferential grading of businesses, and has since been disassociated from the national council.

While wood stove companies fare relatively well on BBB, some other products in the hearth industry do not. Heat Surge, the Amish "miracle heater" that is heavily advertised and is also a exhibitor at HPBA trade shows gets a c minus rating and has hundreds of complaints filed against it. The Alliance for Green Heat has previously written about it here.


Update: (7/15/13) US Stove's BBB rating has changed from Not Rated to a B rating. The company is still not BBB accredited.

Update: (8/20/13) US Stove responded to BBB by removing all reference of BBB's name/logo from their website. BBB has closed this advertising challenge as resolved.

Further reading:

Wood and pellet stove companies improve ratings with the Better Business Bureau; but does it matter? (Jan. 2017)