About
About Flame & Flagstone
An enthusiast, a spreadsheet, and a strong opinion about showing your working.
Flame & Flagstone is written by Scooter M., an enthusiast who is genuinely into this. There is no test lab, no owned units and no expert panel. What there is: published manufacturer specs, arithmetic done in public, and sources on every figure.
Who writes this
Scooter M. I am an enthusiast, in the plain sense of the word: someone who finds this genuinely interesting and reads the manuals for fun. I am not an engineer, not a gas fitter, not an electrician, and not a specialist in outdoor heating. Where those distinctions matter, this site says so and tells you to call someone who is.
What I actually do is read published specifications, compile them, and do the arithmetic that the specifications imply but nobody prints. That is a modest skill and it turns out to be the thing this category is missing.
What this site does not do
We have not tested any of these products. Not one. There is no lab, no test rig, no unit in anyone's yard, and no thermometer at nine feet. You will not find the phrase "in our testing" anywhere on this site, because it would be false.
That is a real limitation and it is worth being direct about it, because the alternative in this category is to imply otherwise. The ranking field leads with hands-on testing claims, and several of those claims are genuine. Ours would not be, so we do not make it.
We also do not accept free product, take sponsored placements, or let anyone pay for a position on a list. There is nothing sophisticated about that policy; it just makes the rest of the site possible to write.
What it does instead
The bet is that published arithmetic is worth more than borrowed authority, and that it is verifiable in a way a testing claim is not. So:
- Every energy price we use is named, dated and sourced. Electricity at 18.34 cents per kWh from the EIA's Electric Power Monthly for June 2026; propane at $2.674 a gallon from the EIA's weekly residential series. Both are on the cost page, with links.
- Every cost, runtime and coverage figure is computed, not typed. There is no field anywhere in this site's content where a price can be written by hand, which is the mechanical reason two pages here cannot disagree about the same heater.
- Coverage claims are labeled. Where a manufacturer publishes one we quote it and say it is theirs. Where none exists we compute one and say it is ours. Never the other way around.
- Clearance figures are cited to a manufacturer, not asserted. Fire Sense publishes theirs; we quote them and tell you your own manual wins.
- Every roundup carries a stated skip-this. A list with no losers is a list nobody edited.
Why this site exists
Because the same question kept having no good answer. How many BTU does a patio actually need? Search it and you get six confident numbers, none showing its working, several contradicting each other, and one calculator that terminates at its own catalog page.
The same is true of running cost, of how long a cylinder lasts, and of whether a heater is safe under a roof. All four are arithmetic. None of them is hard. Almost nobody prints the steps.
So the whole idea here is to print the steps, and to be specific about the one thing this category consistently ignores: wind. A breeze does not reduce a heater's output, it removes the warmed air the output produced — and that single fact explains most of the disappointment people have with heaters they already own. The wind section is the part of this site with the least competition and, I would argue, the most use.
How it is funded
Amazon Associates. When you buy through a link here we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. That is the entire business model, and the disclosure page sets out exactly how the links work.
The obvious question is whether that changes what gets recommended. The honest answer is that it creates a pull, and the thing that counteracts it is publishing the arithmetic — a page that shows its working can be checked, and a recommendation that does not survive its own numbers is visible to everyone.
It also means we tell you when the cheaper answer is not a product. On several pages here the recommendation is a windbreak, a second cylinder, or moving your chairs, and none of those pays much.
Corrections
If a number here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it publicly. Every figure has either a source or its arithmetic on the page, so a disagreement can be about a specific step rather than a conclusion. How corrections work, and how to reach us.
The site, in numbers
- Pages
- 62
- Products written up
- 19
- Free products accepted
- 0
- Sponsored placements
- 0