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Corn-burning stove is hot credibility. Page 2 of 3 "Bob Walker is way out in front of any competition we've seen, without question," said Neil Konietzko, a Bixby investor living in suburban Atlanta. He ought to know: He and his son own a Wisconsin dealership that sells alternative- fuel stoves, including Bixby's and its main competitors. "The vast majority of the stoves out there are much more labor-intensive in terms of starting and maintaining them," Konietzko said. The MaxFire, which retails for $3,995, holds 106 pounds of corn and heats a 3,000-square-foot area at about 45 percent the cost of heating oil and 55 percent the cost of natural gas, Walker said. It is meant to be used with the fan system of a conventional furnace to circulate heat from the stove. Three of the MaxFire prototypes have heated Bixby's 17,000-square-foot plant in Rogers, at a cost of $4.50 a day, Walker said. Given demand for the stove, however, he's not sure he can spare any of them for the 91,000-square-foot plant in Brooklyn Park to which Bixby is moving this month. A possible IPO The larger facility not only will help him fill unmet MaxFire orders, it also will allow Walker to introduce a smaller "room-heater" version of the corn stove that will sell for between $1,995 and $2,495. But all this is mere preamble to Walker's business plan. He figures to take Bixby public late this year and raise another $15 million to $20 million to begin assembling what he calls the "Minnesota Model" for a biomass furnace system. Included in the mix: • Upgrading the MaxFire into a 100,000-BTU furnace system that not only would heat a home, but also convert heat into electricity to furnish much of the home's power. • Building a plant to produce fuel pellets, probably containing readily available waste from sugar-beet and ethanol processing and litter from turkey-production operations. • Expanding Step-Saver statewide to provide abiomass-delivery system while also selling its salt pellets. It all adds up to a persuasive package. But is any of it economically feasible -- particularly Bixby's process for mixing various biomass materials, each with different burn characteristics, into a pellet that burns consistently at the same temperature? At the nonprofit Agricultural Utilization Research Institute in Waseca, which helped Bixby develop its biomass pellets, associate scientist Alan Doering notes that feasibility studies on the gathering and processing of the biomass materials http://www.startribune.com/539/v-prinUstory/408033.htm1 5/10/2006