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"  Can you tell me a little about your company? Tulikivi started with one man&amp;#039;s vision that he could take an unused soapstone quarry and turn it into something that could help keep the local economy growing. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the Finnish Soapstone Company (Suomen Vuolukivi Oy) was formed in the village of Nunnanlahti. In 1980 the company was reorganized and began producing stoves using the name Tulikivi, which means fire stone. Since then it has grown to become the world&amp;#039;s largest producer of soapstone fireplaces and baking ovens. What&amp;#039;s so special about your stove? Give me your elevator pitch. The Tulikivi Hiisi design is a compact, heat-retaining fireplace that is especially well-suited to modern low-energy construction projects. Despite its compact size, the Hiisi builds up heat very effectively, and this is then gently released into the room as a pleasant radiant heat. It&amp;#039;s also a hybrid fireplace, which means that both pellets and wood can be burned without the need for any further equipment or electricity. The stove is a highly efficient, low-emission heat source that already surpasses the world&amp;#039;s tightest emissions standards set for 2015. Your stove can burn both pellets and cordwood, making it unique among the finalists. Were there any design challenges creating a stove that can burn both? The burning controls on the Hiisi are exactly the same for pellets as they are for wood, so nothing needed to be changed to make it happen. Best of all, no electricity is needed for burning pellets. Fortunately, whether burning pellets or wood, it uses the same combustion process in the Hiisi, so deciding to combine the two was an easy choice. One challenge was getting a grate that could allow the correct amount of air through, still hold the pellets, and maintain our high efficiencies and low emissions. One design change we made was to add about 2 mm [slightly more than 1/16 inch] to the top of our air spoiler to allow the homeowner to do one full heating with one load of pellets. Your stove also heats water. Can you explain how this stove can be incorporated into a complete home heating system? While the Hiisi is heating the main portion of a home, such as the living room or kitchen, the water jacket can remove up to 50 percent of the heat created and take that to the water heater. From there it can be brought into other rooms in the form of radiant floor heat at 40 degrees Celsius [104 F]. If the home is well-insulated and the bedrooms don&amp;#039;t need extra heat, a higher temperature from the heater can be set up and then it can go directly to assist with heating domestic hot water to 55 C [131 F]. Other companies have units that heat with water and can achieve much higher temps, but staying within our goal of creating a durable product that will last a lifetime, we wanted a product that would do the same and still be able to cover such a wide range of heating. Your stove sells very well in Europe. What are some of the differences in the stove industry in Europe compared with the U.S., and how does that affect your business? Some countries in Europe are more educated about masonry heaters than others, so in a sense we have to do the same education in Europe that we need to do in the U.S. The difference is in the size of the homes and the care taken in building them. For the most part, Europeans want their homes to last 200 years, so a Hiisi fits very well with this cultural mind-set. It doesn&amp;#039;t hurt that many Europeans enjoy heating with wood and that many of the countries also offer significant tax credits for doing so. That can be taken into account when considering the added cost and value of a masonry heater. In the U.S. a $300 tax credit for an efficient wood-burning appliance is nice, but it doesn&amp;#039;t address the benefits of buying a product that has the durability, safety, and history of clean burning that a masonry heater does. Where do you think the stove industry in the U.S. is heading? It&amp;#039;s possible that the stove industry may find that convection heat can overpower newer, well-insulated, and passive homes, which could move the industry toward heating with thermal mass to spread out the energy created. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to/a9765/wood-stove-decathlon-finalist-tulikivi-hiisi-16153624/>