Harman

How Did Harman Start?

Dane Harman tells the story himself on the Fire Time Podcast, which Tim Reed hosts. In the late 1970s, Dane and his wife, Gloria, had just built a house on family land in Halifax, Pennsylvania, about 25 minutes north of Harrisburg. Then the energy crisis hit, and in Dane's telling, their electric bill jumped from $40 to $100 in a single month, when minimum wage was $1.25 an hour.^[1]

Dane was a welder by trade.^[3] He remembers working as a diesel mechanic and welder at Mack Truck, welding giant industrial heat exchangers, and working as a nuclear-certified welder at the Susquehanna power plant. He wasn't impressed by the welding on the wood stoves he looked at, so he designed his own. He drew the plans to scale on Gloria's cutting board with a T-square, traced steel templates with soapstone, cut the plate by hand with a torch, and welded the corners to look bent because he had no way to bend them.^[1]

Coworkers saw the stove and wanted one. Soon three of them were coming home with Dane after work to build stoves in his basement until 10 at night, three or four a week. When building stoves started paying better than his day job, he took a six-month leave of absence and never went back.^[1] In 1979, the family put up a steel building in the corner of the field beside the house, and Harman Stove and Welding was in business.^[4][5] That building is still beside the family home, added onto more than a dozen times.^[1] In the early years, the stoves sold from a booth at the Friday night market in nearby Gratz.^[1]

From Coal to Pellets: What Makes a Harman Different?

Harman began with coal and wood stoves, the Mark and Magnafire series,^[8] and Dane's first big idea came from the fire itself. His first design had a heat exchanger of eight steel tubes across the top that, he says, looked like the Lincoln Memorial and couldn't be built in production. So he made a spiral chamber instead, where the hot gases circle up and come back down through four pipes. That spiral became the Harman spiral-flame logo.^[1]

The idea that made Harman famous came from anthracite coal. Coal leaves a lot of ash, so Dane built a stoker that feeds coal up from the bottom of the fire, gets hotter as it rises, and pushes the ash up and over the edge of the burn pot.^[2] His coal-stove grate patent, filed in 1987, describes exactly that: fuel pushed along the floor, up a rise, and past a crest.^[5] Harman sold it as the Verti-Flow stoker.

When pellets came along, Dane realized the same design would work even better. Pellets leave far less ash, and a burn pot built to push coal ash pushes pellet ash right off the end.^[2] The PelletPro feeder and burn pot followed. Dane filed the feed-system patent in 1990, and it was granted in 1991.^[6] Because the burn pot clears itself, a Harman can burn just about any grade of pellet.^[10] Then came the ESP, the Exhaust Sensing Probe, which reads the temperature of the fire and adjusts the feed.^[9] Set a Harman to Room Temperature mode and it feeds only what it needs to hold the room where you set it, which is why a Harman burns less fuel on a sunny afternoon.^[14]

What Does “Built to a Standard, Not a Price” Mean?

It's the tagline Dane came up with in the company's early years, and it was printed across the Harman website by 1997.^[7] In Dane's words, if the stove wasn't something people thought was worth buying, it wouldn't work.^[1] Harman cut American steel with lasers and welded it with robots when most of the industry was still cutting by hand.^[10] Dane remembers buying one of the first TRUMPF laser cutters in the United States in the early 1990s, and the jump from sixteenth-of-an-inch to ten-thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances.^[1]

The models kept coming, about two and a half new ones a year by Dane's count, from his sketchbooks to the engineers who built them.^[2] The P61 pellet stove was on the site by 1998,^[10] the Advance with room-temperature control in 1999,^[11] the TLC 2000 top-loading coal stove in 2000,^[12] and the cast-iron Accentra and Oakwood in 2002.^[13] Harman won Vesta Awards in 2003 and 2004, and by 2004 it built more than 40 models.^[13]

Who Owns Harman?

After the hurricanes of 2005 pushed heating oil prices up, pellet stove sales soared, and Harman went all in, with about 350 people and a big expansion planned.^[3] Then came a mild winter and cheaper oil in 2007. U.S. pellet stove sales fell from more than 133,000 in 2006 to about 54,000 in 2007, and Dane told the Central Penn Business Journal he had 23,000 stoves in stock.^[3]

In September 2007, Hearth & Home Technologies, part of HNI Corporation, agreed to buy Harman for $29.75 million in cash,^[16] and the sale closed on November 13, 2007.^[17] Harman had more than $40 million in annual sales.^[16] Dane stayed on as HHT's vice president of advanced technology,^[3] and his daughter, Karen Harman Smeltz, went on to a long career at HHT, including senior brand manager for Harman.^[19] A year later, with oil above $4 a gallon, Harman hired more than 100 people and had about 800 dealers.^[18]

Halifax became the heart of HHT's stove business. In 2017, Quadra-Fire production moved there from Colville, Washington.^[20] Along the way, the Harman line narrowed to pellet stoves and inserts, and the coal and wood stoves were retired.^[15]

Is Harman Still Made? Harman and Forge & Flame

Yes, in Halifax. In August 2023, Hearth & Home Technologies brought Harman, Quadra-Fire, and Vermont Castings under one name: Forge & Flame.^[21] Harman stoves are now sold as Forge & Flame pellet stoves and inserts “Powered by Harman Technology,” and harmanstoves.com forwards to the Forge & Flame website.^[23]

Some names changed. The P43, P61, and P68 are now the Pathfinder P43, P61, and P68, in Forge & Flame's PS series. The Absolute43, Absolute63, XXV-TC, and Allure50 are in the PSX series, along with the Accentra52i-TC and P42i-TC inserts.^[23] If you're looking for a new Harman, you're looking for one of those. The models below are the current lineup.

Where Are Dane and Karen Harman Now?

Still building stoves. At the 2026 HPBA Expo in New Orleans, Dane and Karen told the Harman story together on stage in a fireside chat, and Tim recorded it for the Fire Time Podcast.^[1] Dane says he now consults on stove design for DS Stoves, a Pennsylvania manufacturer, and Karen works with him there.^[2] Listen to Build to a Standard, Not a Price and part two, with Peter Parsons.

Can I Still Get Parts for an Older Harman?

For most pellet models, yes. Hearth & Home Technologies still supports Harman, and Forge & Flame dealers order parts by model and serial number. Photograph the rating label on your stove before you call. Igniters, combustion and distribution blowers, gaskets, and ESP probes are the parts people replace most. Parts for older coal and wood models are harder to find, so ask your dealer what's still available before you plan a repair.