BTU is the input.
TruBTU™ is what you feel.
A BTU rating measures how fast a heater burns fuel — not the warmth that reaches your guests. TruBTU™ measures the heat you actually stand in: felt warmth, the comfort zone it covers, and how long it runs on a standard tank. Verified, not advertised.
Real Heat
Felt warmth at the source, measured as mean radiant temperature — the heat your skin registers, not the rate the burner consumes gas.
Real Reach
The comfort zone, mapped on a radial grid out from the column — where guests stay warm, where they linger, and where warmth fades to ambient.
Real Runtime
Hours of heat on a standard 20 lb propane tank — about 430,000 usable BTU — from a timed cylinder burn. Natural-gas models are line-fed and run continuously.
Stand inside the comfort zone.
Pick a model to map its felt-warmth field at true scale. Drag the evening temperature to see how the zones shift — the same model that warms a terrace at 50°F pulls its comfort radius inward on a colder night.
Protocol Rev 1.0
Place it on the patio.
Choose a model from the catalog and it drops into the center of the space. The infrared field on the floor is its comfort zone at true scale — and the warmth falling across the furniture is the same heat decaying outward. Drag to orbit; switch to top view for the pure overhead read.
Size it to your space.
Enter the area you want to keep warm and how exposed it is. We size against each model's verified comfort coverage — the Real Reach footprint, π·(reach)² — derated for wind and open architecture, so the recommendation is the honest one, not the spec-sheet one.