Backpacking Stoves I Wish I Tried Sooner!

Which is better this or this now before you click because you think you know the answer? I thought so too and if you're like me, you've been using standard canister

stoves

for years, it's fast and reliable and it's a great stove for Sure, but aren't you at least a little curious about all the other types of

stoves

that exist? You have white gas, alcohol, wood, solid fuel and probably some that I'm not even thinking about and that made me think: what if? I'm missing something with one of these other types of stoves. What if there's something better I'm ignoring?

So I decided to give them all a good chance and not only try them, but rate them on a ten point scale to see which one. it really is the best stove and I really thought I already knew the answer but a last minute Underdog really surprised me and on my U2 so let's take a look at it so I spent some time using and testing all of these stoves mainly looking at 10 key areas , including how fast they boil ease of use price weight fuel availability cold weather performance and a few more that I'll write in the description I then rated each stove in each of these areas on a scale of one to five, with five being the best, so I want to look at the pros and cons of each of these stoves, starting with the popular MSR Pocket Rocket 2.

Now mine is actually the deluxe one, but it doesn't matter for this video, this replaces all the canister stoves out there. and the The good thing about canister stoves is that they are practically foolproof and there are very few things that can go wrong. You screw on the container, turn on the stove and release it. Rapidly boils a cup of water in just over a minute. It's light, compact, and doesn't cost that much, only fifty dollars, most people will use a stove like this, which means fuel is available in most cities, especially if there are really good trails nearby.

One downside is that they are not as much better when it is very cold. climate they are a bit noisy and you can't really ration the fuel, for example if you only want to go on a one or two night trip you don't really need all the fuel that is in the canister, almost all other stoves. I'm talking today they give you the ability to ration smaller amounts of fuel and these canisters are a little wasteful if you throw them away once you're done, but you can grab a refill valve like I mentioned in another video.

Overall this was the second best stove on my list which surprised me as I really thought it was going to be the best but we'll talk about that in a moment Very similar to pocket rockets are these jetboil chimney stoves. For an MSR version, the MSR Wind Burner, these things have most of the same benefits as standard canister stoves, but are even faster thanks to the large windproof burners and pack neatly into themselves, but they have some major drawbacks. Expensive approaching two hundred dollars, you can only use the included pots or pots that are specifically designed to fit this stove and are heavy as this stove weighs one pound and eight ounces including fuel.

These types of stoves are in fifth place in my opinion. list very similar to both are white gas stoves and this is kind of the original high tech

backpacking

stove, at least when I was young, this is the MSR whisper light, this one can be converted to use cancerous or white gas stoves. It's a useful stove if you want the ease of a canister stove but want to take it to really cold temperatures, as you can flip the canister over to use liquid butane or you can convert it to use white gas. You may have seen an older one of these that only uses white gas and this is how we are going to test this one today as if it were a white gas only stove.

Some of the benefits of white gases are easy to come by, and you can often find them even when you can't. look for fuel in a can White gas It also works well in cold climates because of the way the stove is designed, you pass the liquid fuel through the flame to atomize it before lighting it, so you should prepare the stove a little more than you needs. Letting some liquid fuel collect at the bottom of the stove and turning it on so you can heat the fuel inside the line. If you've never done this before, the whole process can be a little intimidating, which is a definite downside.

On top of that, it's expensive, almost two hundred dollars, weighs almost two pounds including fuel, and is not as clean as butane, producing a bit of soot. You may also notice that I'm using this larger stainless steel pot mainly because my titanium pot is too small for the stove tips, that's probably not true for all white gas stoves, but even without considering this one it's still Being the worst stove on my list, with only 18 points in 10 different categories, okay, up to this point we've been talking about conventional stoves, the kind of thing you'll find at Big Box outdoor stores, but the following stoves don't.

You'll find them at places like REI, for these you need to check out the garage grown kits because they specialize in hard to find cabins. gear that offers a lot of gear that you can't find anywhere else, but even if you're a more average backpacker, because there's nothing wrong with garage-grown gear that has more brands every day, both traditional and artisanal brands , and that's the point. What makes Garage Grow Kits unique is that they are not just an outdoor store, they are a

backpacking

specific store, so if you want to find more products designed specifically for what you like to do, you really need to see them, click the link in the description. or visit garagesgrowngear.com, thank you garage growgear for sponsoring this video.

Now people have been cooking using fire for years and before gas stoves were the way to go, you may have seen one of the wood stoves that had the little B fan and USB charger that ran off the heat of the fire. fire which is basically the really expensive version of a simple wood stove like this one from Tokes. This is a super simple stove that uses forest twigs as fuel, obviously wherever there are. are trees, you will likely find plenty of fuel to fuel your stove, you may have some problems in high alpine areas or very humid conditions, the stove is lightweight, weighing just over 5 ounces, and since sticks are collected for fuel there is no need to worry about the weight of the fuel, it's also relatively inexpensive, only $45, but this is also the slowest stove I tested.

It took me about three minutes to get the fire going and then another five minutes to boil a cup of water, and because it uses twigs, the fire can go out relatively quickly and requires you to give it more twigs as you go to boil more than a cup of water. It is also quite dirty with a lot of soot stuck to the bottom of my toke pot and it is the only stove. which you can't turn off or turn off once you're done cooking, from my testing this was the second worst stove on my list, one of the stoves that really surprised me were the S bit style solid fuel stoves.

I have this Vargo Titanium Stove which is actually an alcohol stove on one side, but you can flip it over and burn solid fuel pellets on the other side. What really surprised me was the weight. This is the lightest stove on my list, only 2.2 ounces. Including four taps of fuel that would be enough for me to cook for four different nights on the road. The stove itself is only $35, which would make it the cheapest, except you'll almost certainly need some type of windshield. I bought this titanium 10 windshield with puffs, which brings my total to forty-five dollars, now it takes a little longer to boil water, it takes almost five minutes to boil just one cup of water, but there is basically no prep time and probably The worst part is the availability of fuel.

I couldn't find any fuel tabs in my hometown and it was going to take over a week for Amazon to send me some, so if you need to pick something up on a slightly longer hike on a resupply day, you might run into trouble. find fuel, but the nice thing about this particular stove is that if you can't find solid fuel, you can still use it as an alcohol stove. Now, for my testing, I rated the solid fuel and liquid alcohol as two separate stoves and even though the alcohol stove took a little longer to boil the water, it outperformed the solid fuel due to the ease of availability of the alcohol.

You can find denatured alcohol at almost any hardware store, and failing that, you can use 91 isopropyl alcohol which can be found at In almost any grocery store or drugstore, this stove had 35, but many people build their own stoves from beer cans or cans of cat food and they are very fun and great to play with. My biggest complaints about alcohol stoves are the slow cooking. Sometimes it takes a little time to get them ready to go out at full power and it's a little tricky to recover unused fuel, but while I was getting ready to film this, a guy from South Texas sent me this little bottle of stove pills. alcohol that he makes himself from the same material that is used in pizza oven firewalls, they are just these little stone tablets that you charge by soaking them in alcohol for about 10 minutes the night before or immediately after using one to make it ready to use next time, then when you're ready to cook, stack two of them on the small metal disc and set them on fire.

This thing really surprised me by how quickly it boiled a cup of water in under three minutes with basically no set up time, then once it's done turn it off and 30 seconds later the tablets will be cool enough to touch. It is lightweight, with four fully loaded tablets weighing only four ounces and it is the cheapest stove on my list costing only Thirty-nine dollars which includes four tablets, a bottle of pills, a small titanium windshield and the small metal disc the one you put it in now, while I was testing them I thought they were great, but I didn't really think they would work much better. than a regular alcohol stove, so I was surprised when I added up my 10-point score and saw that this little pill bottle-shaped stove scored the highest of all the stoves I tested.

It's fast, it's easy to use, it's economical, it's lightweight and it's easy to use. available fuel that cools quickly and burns clean It works in cold weather and you can adjust the amount of fuel you want to carry with you and that surprised me that this simple little alcohol stove could outperform my

tried

and true canister stove, something that I never would have known if I hadn't

tried

it hello everyone future Steven here so after filming a lot of that I got a little more experience with this pill bottle stove and I once had a problem where it tipped over on level ground.

I think it was partly my fault because I didn't take the time to make sure it was nice and balanced, but it also seemed to discharge the moment it hit the ground as if the ground somehow absorbed all the alcohol from the stone. Now I don't know what's going on there, to be honest I need more time with him. I'm going to take off a couple of points to bring it in line with my MSR Pocket Rocket Deluxe and if I'm honest, even though I'm really intrigued by the stove, I don't know if it's enough to stop me from picking up my tried and true Pocket Rocket, well, back to that to the video, I just want to give you that quick update, now I need to add that.

In some places, canister stoves are the only ones allowed by law, mainly due to fire hazards out west, as you can probably see, several of these stoves could easily start fires under the right conditions, so before you head out, Be sure to check local legal regulations. and conditions if you made it this far in the video do me a favor i was recently nominated for best outdoor vlog of the year although i wouldn't really call what i do vlogging anyway i need your vote to win click link in description and vote for Whoever on that list thinks is best, hopefully it's me, your support means a lot to me, be sure to like, subscribe and do all that other stuff and as always, thanks for watching fuel liquid fuel liquid fuel liquid fuel