Roger Lehet watched helplessly as his previously successful 25-year-old wood stove business crumbled at his feet in a perfect storm of The Great Recession. When the dust finally settled, the Lehet family of three, found themselves living on a boat moored in Puget Sound off the coast of Vashon Island, a fifteen-minute ferry ride from Seattle, Washington.

Realizing that no manufacturer made a wood stove appropriately sized to tuck into the tiny space that he carved out of the boat’s cabinetry, Roger Lehet cobbled together some salvaged parts from the rubble of his defunct business to make the first rendition of what he would eventually patent as the Kimberly™ wood stove. It was far from pretty, but Lehet’s brainchild worked, and his family was adequately warmed despite the fury of the winter’s Pacific storms.

It then occurred to Lehet that a thermoelectric generation system would allow his family to live in comfort inside their off-grid makeshift home and that his tiny wood stove should not only heat his family’s tiny living quarters but also allow his family to cook, bake, heat water, and generate electricity.

Word about Lehet’s invention traveled quickly—as happens in a very small town—and before long, a local Vashon resident showed up at the dock advising Roger to “make it look pretty and get a patent on it.” By the fall of 2012, Kimberly™ had passed the rigors of her EPA-CSA emissions and UL safety testing, and Unforgettable Fire™ was in business as a newly minted entity.

Kimberly™ has recently been re-engineered for easier ash removal and an even longer and cleaner burn. The new and improved Kimberly™ 2.0 is otherwise the same stove that our clients have known and loved since 2012.

Lehet believed that creating electricity from the heat of a wood stove was possible because he once read that the Russians did it during WWI. He also believed that no one in the United States had previously developed the technology for commercial purposes, so he gathered a team to explore the possibilities.

Meanwhile, Kimberly™ continued to gain acceptance as the preferred wood stove in the tiny house movement, which was beginning to gain momentum at that time. Acceptance in the RV, bus conversion, and marine communities soon followed. Kimberly’s petite size, long burn time of up to eight hours coal-bed-to-coal-bed, and 6-inch side clearance made Kimberly™ an ideal choice for heating smaller spaces.

By providing heating security for alternative and off-grid living quarters, Lehet’s Kimberly™ stove has made it possible for many people to live out their dreams. Many have found that their investment in a Kimberly™ stove has paid for itself in a couple of years by reducing or eliminating the need for propane.

A year after her launch, Kimberly™ had her chance to shine internationally as one of a dozen stoves invited from around the world to participate in the 2013 Wood Stove Design Challenge, held in a big tent on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Although Kimberly™ was an immediate hit in the U.S. and Canadian marketplace, many people contacted Unforgettable Fire™ asking for a bigger stove for their bigger home.