Masterbuilt’s brand strategy has focused on charcoal grills that are automatically controlled to make charcoal grilling easier. While they offer a couple products that don’t fit this mold, that’s their bread and butter.

With brands like Solo Stove and Breeo leading the charge, smokeless fire pits have become much more well known. While the smokeless fire pit market has become more competitive with lots of new market entrants, it’s still a large category overall.

We’re seeing more patents lately that deal with one design flaw of smokeless fire pits. They don’t project much heat laterally.

It’s something that Solo Stove is working on and it would appear Masterbuilt is doing the same. They’re not a name that you’d associate with smokeless fire pits, but they are interested enough in that category to develop a patent in it.

At first glance the Masterbuilt smokeless fire pit looks very different than other on the market. While the outside looks different and even more decorative, it follows a similar design on the inside to other fire pits, but with one key difference.

Other smokeless fire pits pull external air into the fire pit through the bottom. This makes it so the fire pits sit up higher, with warm air missing the users’ feet.

The Masterbuilt design pulls air in from the top, just under the upper lip on the fire pit. Then, it follows the same air flow where the air is fed from the bottom, heated, and out through the top on the inside for the secondary burn. If you look at the cutaway, it’s almost like they put a smokeless fire pit inside of a different fire pit.

How this helps with heating a user’s legs and feet is the fire pit can sit lower. They even suggest it could be partially buried. With the air coming in from the top, it won’t get choked off like other designs. It’s a way to not try and fight thermodynamics, but rather design around it to keep the heat lower.