About Ring & Ember
A fire pit site that ranks products from what the manufacturers publish, does the arithmetic in public, and tells you plainly that it has not burned any of them.
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What this site is
Ring & Ember covers fire pits across all three fuels — wood, propane and smokeless — plus the two questions that actually decide which one you can own: where it is allowed to sit, and what your jurisdiction permits. There are currently 58 pages and 18 products tracked.
The premise is narrow and it is the whole thing: everything on this site is derived from published information, and every figure is traceable to its source. Manufacturer specification sheets for alloy, gauge, dimensions, weight, burner ratings and warranty terms. Code text quoted directly for clearance distances and permit thresholds. Government energy data for the running-cost arithmetic. Live Amazon data for prices. Where a maker publishes nothing, the row says “not stated” rather than a number we made up.
Who writes it
One person: Scooter M.. An enthusiast who's genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specs, and do the math. No lab coat.
That framing is deliberate and it is the honest one. There is no editorial team here, no panel of experts, no test facility, and no trade credential. What there is, is somebody who will read a warranty document to find out what it excludes, look up the higher heating value of propane rather than repeat a figure from another blog, and publish the division.
You will not find a claim on this site that Scooter M. is a long-time anything, a specialist, a certified installer or a fire professional. Those would all be easy to write and impossible to substantiate, and the first person to check would find out. What is claimed is exactly what is done: reading the manuals, compiling the specifications, and doing the math.
Why it exists
Because the fire pit category has a specific and fixable gap. The best-resourced sites in it buy units and test them, which is genuinely valuable and which we cannot honestly imitate. But underneath those, the pages that actually rank for the questions people ask — how far from the house, can it go on a deck, does a burn ban cover this, how much propane does it use — are frequently anonymous, undated, uncited retailer content.
On those questions we are not competing with a test lab. We are competing with a page that has no byline, no date and no source for the number it is asserting. A named author, a real update date, a quoted code section and visible arithmetic beat that comfortably, without a single claim we cannot support.
Two examples of the gap, both of which turn up on this site. Nobody in this category publishes burn hours per propane tank by BTU rating, and it is a two-line calculation from figures the US Department of Energy publishes. Nobody publishes steel gauge and alloy per model alongside what the warranty actually excludes. Those are the two numbers that determine what a fire pit costs to run and how long it lasts.
What we will not do
- Claim to have tested anything. We have not burned any of these products. Every product page says so, in a section listing what a specification sheet cannot tell you.
- Invent a credential. No certifications, no “reviewed by our expert panel”, no implied staff.
- Print a price we cannot source. Prices render only from a live feed and disappear when they go stale. A button that says “check price” is the correct output when we do not have one.
- Repeat an unsourced figure. Every smoke-reduction percentage in this category circulates without a published method behind it, so none appears here.
- Publish a fabricated review or testimonial. Ring & Ember has no customers, so it has no reviews, so there is no testimonials section anywhere on the site.
- Summarize your local ordinance. We quote the model fire code and link it. Anything local is described as a process and a phone number, because we have not read your city’s code.
How it is funded
Affiliate commission, disclosed on every page that carries a link. The full disclosure covers who we earn from, what that does and does not affect, and what we do about the obvious conflict of interest.
Corrections
If a figure on this site is wrong, we want to know, and a source makes it fast to fix. Send it here or email info@ringandember.com. The editorial policy sets out how corrections are handled and how often pages are reviewed.
The publisher
Ring & Ember is published by Slate Mill Group, founded 2026. It is an independent publication rather than a retailer: we hold no inventory, ship nothing, and have no commercial relationship with any manufacturer named on the site.