In 2024, Hinesburg software engineer Neil Shah was working in his second-floor home office, frustrated by the fact that he had to go downstairs every 30 minutes to check on the home’s two woodstoves. A city kid who had never lived with wood heat before, he suffered from “woodstove anxiety.” He didn’t want the house to get cold. More importantly, he didn’t want to burn it down.
To maintain a safe and efficient burn — and to minimize his work interruptions — Shah magnetically attached a temperature sensor to his stovepipe and wired it to a Raspberry Pi, a tiny, inexpensive computer. The resulting tool sent texts to his phone: “Your stove is cooling, it might be time to reload” or “Your stove has reached it’s [sic] optimal temperature” or “ALERT: Your stove’s temperature is rising really fast.”
Soon, his friends wanted their own copies of the gadget. Then his wife, Kate DiMercurio, asked for another feature — a device she could glance at instead of pulling out her phone. So Shah built a lamp that glows amber when the fire is burning optimally and yellow when the fire is getting too low. It pulses bright red if the stove gets too hot.
Now, 11 months after he built that first lamp, Shah’s woodstove monitor is in mass production. He has named it Oru, which means “come home” in Gujarati, his parents’ native language. Oru’s sensor connects to the lamp over Wi-Fi and to an app via the cloud, allowing the app to deliver information when the user is away from home. While Oru sends a myriad of details about a burn and can even tell users where to find a local chimney sweep, it does not function as a smoke or carbon monoxide detector, Shah said, and woodstove owners should use both.
The first 500 Orus roll out in November, with another 500 expected by year’s end. Each sells for $209 (rising, in increments, to $299 in January), and hundreds of people have put down a $25 deposit. The free app does not require a subscription.
Shah has created a Jetsons solution to a Flintstones problem, and the maker world has seen its promise. LaunchVT, Lake Champlain Chamber’s business accelerator program, accepted Shah into its 2026 cohort and awarded him the year’s $15,000 grand prize. Kickstarter and Google tapped Oru for their Next Wave Fund, a program that gives Shah free training, marketing and promotional support and a $10,000 pledge to his Kickstarter fundraising campaign. That campaign launches on October 27 and, thanks to the Next Wave Fund, will immediately meet its $10,000 goal. The crowdfunding platform gave Oru yet another boost by naming it a Kickstarter “Project We Love.”
An Oregon man who owns one of the 57 prototypes that Shah built by hand at Generator Makerspace in Burlington said Oru has given him peace of mind and convenience. Carlos Camarena told Seven Days in an email that he’s a relatively new woodstove owner who learned that everything about safe operation depends on fire temperature. Other monitoring tools require being in the same room as the stove, he said.
Shah has created a Jetsons solution to a Flintstones problem.
“Even working from home, it became a chore walking across the house to keep an eye on the fire,” he said. “Pointing a little wifi camera at the stove was an early rudimentary solution, but having friends and family over also meant explaining the ‘fire camera’; it was just awkward.”
Oru, he said, brings “just enough connectivity” to an otherwise analog operation.
For the first 36 years of his life, Shah never thought about woodstoves, nor did he build hardware. A software developer raised primarily on Long Island, he lived in San Francisco and New York City before moving to Vermont in 2023 with his wife, a Bristol native. That June, she was thrilled when they bought a house with two woodstoves. Shah considered them ornamental, until winter arrived. The stoves are the home’s primary source of heat, and Shah was “terrified” of them, he said.
Indeed, heating and cooking fires are the leading cause of house fires in Vermont, the state with the highest percentage of homes heated with wood. Wet wood or a fire that’s not hot enough allows creosote to accumulate in the chimney. That tar-like residue is highly flammable.
Shah’s neighbors were chill about firing up their wood heat, while he filled his house with smoke, turned the flue red-hot and cracked the stone behind one of the stoves. Kate was pregnant at the time, he recalled on “Start Here,” a podcast produced by the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies. “I’m about to be a dad, and I’m filling up the house up with smoke,” he said. “It was not a good scene.” A chimney sweep further stoked his fears, “telling me about all these things I need to worry about.”
Desperate for help, he turned to the “woodstoving” community on the social network Reddit. Two years later, members of that community became his first customers.
Shah, now 40, had started and sold another business before Oru. A company he and a partner founded to develop software tools for integrative health practitioners was acquired within a year by health care technology company Fullscript. Shah was working remotely for Fullscript in early 2024 when he built that monitor using a Raspberry Pi.
He had left the Ottawa, Ontario, company and was casting about for a new venture last fall when DiMercurio, a former product manager, suggested he develop the lamp, augment it with an app and try to sell it. With woodworking help from a neighbor, he built a more aesthetically pleasing lamp with a walnut base, milled from a tree on his property. He also built an app to deliver temperature, burn history, push notifications and alerts. Once again, he turned to Reddit. In January, he posted a photo of the sleek cube-shaped lamp and asked his community if they’d use a system like his and what features they would like.
“Duuuude this is incredible,” one member replied.
“WILL buy,” another said.
Before he had committed to selling them, 1,700 people signed up for his email list. When Shah decided to produce prototypes, he contacted the first 100 to ask if they’d buy one at cost and sold 57 — but he didn’t know how to make anything out of wood. At Generator, he learned to run a planer, a jointer, a variety of routers and saws, and a computer numerical control — or CNC — machine, which carries out a sequence of programmed tasks. He cut, sanded and oiled each base (the first 23 came from his walnut tree), built every circuit board, made each lamp lid on a 3D printer, and completed all 57 by the end of March. He dispatched them around the country, from Maine to Alaska.
He refined the app as users provided feedback. A very early iteration featured a flame icon named Burnie who popped up on phone screens to give users updates, saying things such as “Good burn!” or “It’s been three days since your last burn.”
Users didn’t like hearing from Burnie, Shah said. “People who got the first version of the app were like, ‘Please get rid of this.’”
Shah handled every component in those 57 prototypes. “I loved being in the weeds, learning everything about my product,” he said. But that method didn’t scale. Sanding a single lamp base took him an hour and a half. For assistance, he turned to Sam Holland, a Colchester mechanical engineer who cofounded Informal, a company that supports people developing physical goods. Holland helped Shah redesign Oru for mass production and find vendors — all in China — to build, assemble and package his product. Each lamp still has a walnut base.
Even with tariffs that account for 37.5 percent of his materials cost, producing Oru overseas is far cheaper than making it in the U.S., Shah and Holland said. Quality, particularly when it comes to injection molding, is better in China, Shah added.
“I wanted to make them here,” he said, but “it’s exceedingly difficult to make products in the United States.” The retail price would at least triple.
Shah has self-financed his venture so far with the help of investors and a loan from the Vermont Economic Development Authority. He will use the money he raises on Kickstarter to help cover his costs and repay his loan.
Shah so impressed Sarah Kearns at LaunchVT’s Demo Night in June that she and her husband, David, invested in Oru. The idea is brilliant, Sarah said, and she found Shah smart, humble and hardworking. The irony is, she doesn’t need an Oru. She grew up in New Hampshire with a woodstove and hated it. It would go out during the night, she said: “I could see my breath in the morning.”
When she and David moved to Middlebury 20 years ago, she said, “First thing I did was I took the woodstove out of my house.” Woodstoves are hard to manage, she said. Shah “has really identified a problem that so many people have.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “On Fire | A Hinesburg inventor’s woodstove monitor allows users to track stove temperatures from anywhere”
This article appears in The Tech Issue • 2026.
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