TWIG STOVES: Practical or Novelty?

hi folks Brad Mitchell here today we're gonna be talking about these tweaks gifts I've seen these before I traditionally use coarse white gas or propane fueled backpacking stoves or a mountain bike country but I've seen these tweaks goes around and I want to give my shot I've never tried it before and I really want to know are these practical for backcountry use let's check that out let's compare them in terms of weights convenience performance other factors wolf we'll go and boil some water on this thing and we'll try to answer the question is this really practical can play any kind of practical role in backcountry cooking or is it just more of a novelty let's give it a shot we'll compare it to traditional white gas and propane backpacking stoves and let's see if we find out [Music] okay yeah this just compared a this twig stove to more traditional white gas backpacking stoves or the these newer propane backpacking stoves let's do the comparison see how they how they perform in terms of weights convenience and other factors so this can wait wick stove I purchased online for under 20 bucks okay that's that's pretty nice it's a good that's a good price and in theory there's no cost or fuel because the idea is you would pick up twigs or pinecones or whatever in the backcountry and just burn them in here but does it work is this really practical that's what we're gonna try now this particular stove is it's called a gasifier stove and the way this works is there's ventilation holes here in the bottom to draw air in you just assemble this a little bit the the this little cup here is where you put the is where you put the wood and that's fits in this part here which sits on top like that now one thing about this is is you'll see there's ventilation holes here on the bottom so that air that comes in here can can feed the fire in this cup but this the cylinder is also that a hollow wall so not only is air flow into the wood this way it also flows up into this hollow wall and then comes out near the top too these little ventilation holes here so not only do we have a fire burning in here fed with oxygen from below but we also have oxygen flowing up this wall driven by the chimney effect right when oxygen when air is hot it rises and it comes out here so that so this this additional injection of air causes a secondary burn of the fuel up higher in this in this chamber the secondary burn creates more heat for the amount of fuel you have you put inside and also creates a cleaner more complete cleaner burn so that means less smoke that's the theory a word we'll try that in a minute but let's first take a closer look the stove so pack together it looks like this and this everything nuts together pretty tightly comes with a little ditty bag that this just slips into anyways it assembles like this like that and these little wings fold out so you hold the pot on top again and I paid about I paid under $20 for this I will put a link down below in the descriptions where you can see the see the where you can purchase it online if you're interested in that I originally intended to shoot this this video last weekend when I was up in the North Cascades of Washington State however they implemented a fire band up there and super wasn't able to actually test this stuff in the backcountry because of that fire band and there we go there's one of the first lessons learned about these weeks left weak stoves you can't use them when it's a fire band on so there is a limitation there it seems like we have more and more fire bands going on and in recent years they seem to be starting earlier in the year in this case the fire bans started August 2nd or August 1st or august 2nd something like that and it'll probably last the rest of the summer so so right there are these things these d stoves may have a limited application just because of those kinds of factors we go this when I was up in the North Cascades I did pick up some twigs so I have here a bag of twigs and some some moss and even some paper bark which is difficult to find here in Washington State I actually did find that a bark tree and was able to pull some the bark off so we'll go ahead and try to burn this will analyze how much fuel it takes to actually bring some water to a boil here in a minute so let's start with some of the physical attributes here's the twig stuff in its in its bag and it's weighing in at 522 grams you can see the size it's pretty pretty convenient size actually and again there's a there's no fuel weight because you pick up that fuel in the field the stove costs about I think I paid about $18 for it and of course there's no fuel costs either so yeah there you go that's the tweaked stove let's compare it to some more traditional stoves here's the whisper light international this is the cost about $120 for the stove with the fuel bottle it weighs in at 335 grams then you add the bottle to that yeah with fuel this is this is filled with fuel that's additional 734 grams the fuel bought this fuel bottle will support two people for about three days like I said the stove costs about $120 with with the bottle together and fuel costs about $13 a quart it saw you the fuel is pretty pretty efficient so you'll get you'll get a lot of use out of the out of the out of $13 and one quart of fuel but there is a cost but it's not that significant in my mind so so here's the Jetboil system that weighs in at 380 grams these stoves cost about $100 each the fuel normally nests inside I don't have that inside right now for because I want to weigh it that weighs in at 200 200 grams it's a 200 gram cylinder with 100 grams of fuel in it hundred grams of fuel they advertise it as burning 10 liters or boiling 10 liters of water so typically I would plan on one of these for about every three days for two people backpacking one of the challenges with these is knowing how much is left when she started burning into one of these it's really hard to know how much is left I would suggest weighing it on a scale like this like I said the the empty weight of the canister is 100 grams and there's a hundred grams of fuel so by way that you can tell how much fuels left that works pretty good for me the the hundred gram canister cost five dollars so compared to why gas it's actually pretty expensive it's much more expensive I should say I don't know if you would consider it expensive in total that really depends on your economic situation but it is it is more costly than white gas for sure and of course the twig still has no fuel costs at all but mess it together nestled together it's a pretty compact unit I'd say it's pretty comparable to the twig stove and then here's the MSR stove but needing its fuel model so I would say the twig stove and the propane stove about the same size and then the MSR stove of this fuel bottle is similar it's probably a little bit a little bit larger something to think about when you're wanting to pack all the stuff in the backpack all right enough with all the geeky technical specs let's set this guy up and fire it up and see how it performs so here's the twigs I gathered when I was up in the North Cascades last week just it took about five minutes to gather this just a bunch of twigs off the ground and some moss and I happened to find a birch tree and was able to get some birch bark off of that it's not very common in Washington State but so this is the this is the twigs five minutes to pick up all free of cost I so separated the the twigs that are bark lists and maybe lighter weight maybe more cedar ish from the twigs that have bark on them I'm gonna start with these twigs and we use the the birch back and the moss in these lighter cedar type twigs to get this thing started and I'm going to feed it with these other birch twigs later yeah there's only about five minutes to gather this and yeah we'll see how much we burn we're gonna go a half a liter of water or about half a quart 500 milliliters and we'll see how long it takes but this first let's get this thing lit up and see how long it takes to to get gone and then we'll put the water on I do want to mention that I have the stove sitting on this aluminum foil tray this is the aluminum foil tray from my MSR whisper light stove and that's because of some things are read about some of these Peaks toes off the internet you see if the ash can fall through the stove and land on the ground so if you're working on if you're working with this weak stove on the forest floor that's a concern right there's a risk that the ash could land on the soil maybe even ignite some some of the debris in the soil and begin to insert a fire or damage any underbrush so or my case today that actually fall through go through my table and land on my deck so so for this for this demo today I have this tray if you're using this stove on a rock or something like that that would not be a concern okay I'm gonna go ahead and remove the top just for purposes of getting this thing started and let's see if we can get this thing started that's the beauty of birchbark is it burns really really well it's got resins in it and so does this Moss this this is just dried moss that comes off the trees okay that Moss does create a bit of smoke but once it burns off hopefully we'll have a hopefully that'll be reduced so we're definitely starting to offer some smoke also this is the first time the stove has been used so there there could be manufacturing oils or coatings on it and such like that they have to burn off the first time I pull this big guy out he might be a little too big smoke has cleaned up a bit now we'll just let this fire get establish and the twigs I have in there so far I noticed when that little breeze came that it came close to blowing out it might be a wise idea to have sort of a windshield here when at least when starting okay now this is interesting and beginning to see see the how the flame is currently not pear like there's air coming out of these these upper vents that might be the gasifier effects starting up you know it's going to take a couple of minutes to create that that remember the air is going in the bottom and up these hollow sides and then coming out around the top edge that probably takes a little bit of time to establish itself because that that chimney effect has to get started yeah you can see this gasifier effect you can see the flame coming out as the air is coming out there the flame is they sort of concentrate itself towards the middle of the of the cylinder here although the winds blowing it around quite a bit asking that but hopefully you can see that the gasifier effect is going there is flame coming out of these or air coming out of these holes and feeding the flame and you're just producing a very nice sort of clean flame with actually minimal smoke this is pretty dry wood that also helps make the smoke free pretty minimal I'm thinking it's about time to go and put some water on here let's go and put the top on top is on wow that really focuses the flame to the center so I have here 16 ounces about 500 milliliters of water and we'll go ahead and put that on here let's go ahead and pour that right into this pan put that on the stove okay I'm starting to watch here and we'll see how long that takes to to boil and you mean I'll be able to see from the angle but there is an opening here so you can continue to feed twigs into the into the unit [Music] take this off for a minute and have a look at that there we go this is the flame looks like right now so if I take the pod off you can see there's really just a few embers in there but there's a tremendous amount of heat coming out so this is really burning the wood very efficiently we've really hardly even touched our wood supply I really only got through those those a sort of extra dry cedar type to eggs so this is actually burning pretty efficiently there's a lot of heat coming out there even though there's not a lot of flame coming out let's take a look at that again hope that ty needs to be popped down a little bit more so there's something you know thinking about the size of the twigs and getting those right it's probably important feeding is slow seems to be okay seems to work okay through that little hole it's a little bit of cumbersome but not bad I think it's really it's important to make sure these twigs are point of small oscillations going nice and smooth without hanging up I'm not foreseeing any effect here on the water oh yeah we got boys in the Bott bubbles on the bottom of the pan already we are six minutes in now all right we're seven minutes in seven minutes and it just started boiling there you go seven minutes rolling boil I'm going to take this off for a moment because we can look inside the stove there's the flame we've got going there interesting is if you hardly use any of our twigs you mad at twigs that we have burned in there probably we've taken one minute to gather in the field so so that's pretty good I'm actually pretty impressed with that so this took about maybe maybe a minute to set up and a couple of minutes to get twigs and we had half a liter of water boiling in seven minutes you think about the Jetboil that that could probably do it and you could probably set up a Jetboil start it and have the water boiling in about three minutes so this to take about twice as long as a jet boil as far as the MSR stove that would probably take you about a couple of minutes to set up including pumping the canister and getting everything set up it takes time to get a MSR stove started because you have to do the little pre the little pre heating thing by putting fuel in the cup and starting it legging it and waiting for the gas to preheat so that that might take three minutes to set up an MSR stove and then maybe another two or three minutes to get the water boiling so that's like six seven minutes so this is actually just about as much time as an MSR stuff a couple of other things about this other comparisons this is pretty cool this is I'm sure the quietest option the Jetboil propane stoves are are a little bit noisier they make them definitely making noise and the MSR white gas in white gas no definitely makes quite a bit of you burner noise when it's going so I'd say this is probably the most aesthetically pleasing option it's kind of nice to have the sole source of heat here a nice little fire going in there so I'd say this gets the aesthetically pleasing award and convenience factor wise it's probably not quite as convenient as a Jetboil but it's it's you know one factor on that would be finding dry wood if you're out and or if it's been raining for for a while it can be definitely be harder to find dry wood so that would definitely be an inconvenience factor for this stove and those kinds of conditions another factor is it may take a little extra work I haven't tried this yet may take a little extra work to get this thing to turn off and cool down probably not a big deal if you're up for your evening meal you can let it sit there and cool on its own burn out and cool on its own but if you're if you're in a reckless mode and you want to get on the trail that might be a concern to might take a while for this thing to to cool down you're going to have to handle this hot stove get the ash safely dumped out and then safely cooled and quenched so that it's not any kind of potential fire source force fire source so it's definitely a little bit of an extra inconvenience there so so those are some pros and cons so I do want to repeat the my warning my caution on one aspect of the stove and that is the reason I use this aluminum foil below is see that ash there that ash is really hot and there's the so that's ash that dribbled out of the combustion chamber and at the bottom of the stove and that could be a source of causing a a ground fire or forest fire so definitely watch out for that definitely use some kind of a tray like this or use the stove on a rock something that's that's don't use it on a combustible surface is the main point there is a stove out there similar so much of this that I've seen that advertises as have you solve that problem by having a combustion chamber bottom that is solid but still has air vents Vincent to it from the sides I will find that and put that down below in the description as well as a link to this stove itself and down the description because this is only $18 just pretty nice the other one that has that more solid bottom I think was significantly more expensive but this would work if you just take this extra precaution let's talk conclusions is this stove really viable as a replacement for a back packing cooking stuff in comparison to say an MSR white gas stove or a jet boil propane type stove I'm actually pretty surprisingly happy with the results this actually surprised me just actually worked pretty good it's interesting interesting comparison with a couple of precautions so let's start with some technical conclusions any wise this system is very comparable as I've been doing a little bit less weight than the Jetboil propane stove and it's it's almost only half the weight of the MSR whisper light international with its fuel as well this comes in as a lightest stove system definitely the least expensive option $18 for the stove versus a hundred for the Jetboil are 120 for the for the MSR whisper light international system and zero fuel costs where the propane the Jetboil it has quite a bit of expense on these these propane canisters volume wise this stove is right in there same volume as the Jetboil stove and even smaller than the MSR whisper light with its fuel bottle some of the pros I really like the ambiance of cooking over these coals you know even just boiling water I know it's kind of crazy but just the sound of the of the coals and and nice warm radiant dry heat coming off the thing is I don't know is this Pleasant and it is for sure the quietest option but a couple things to watch out for you got to have dry wood so this is not going to be a good option if you're camping out in the snow or if you're camping in or after a heavy rain I mean you can find dry wood in those conditions but you really have to work out a lot harder you can't use if there's a fire ban on so that's something else to watch out for and then like I mentioned earlier there's this risk of the ash coming at the bottom and starting to ground fire now that's also true of course with any of the other stoves you need to wad you need to be aware of that for other steps so what am i way to replace my my regular stoves backpacking stoves with this I'd say probably not but I am definitely going to go ahead and take this out on another trip on a future trip maybe a canoe trip or a sea kayaking trip after the burn ban has been lifted of course I like the ambiance of it if I was on a canoe trip or a kayaking trip where weight is not an issue I might just take this along with a regular stove and take both of them along take this along for the quiet charming ambience but take the MSR or the Jetboil when I need performance I mean I definitely prefer the MSR on longer trips because of the energy density of the white gas the Jetboil is a good option for weekend trips this because it's so convenient and fast but this fits in there this fits into the mix I think as a as an ambiance type of a stove to use on a canoe trip or a sea kayaking trip so that's my conclusion at this point I'm going to take this out on one of those kinds of trips to validate that but yeah that's it if you get one of these I would definitely get one of these with that gasifier effect I was telling me about the hollow walls well again I'll put a link down below in the description for this stove as well as an alternative that's that's probably a little bit better but definitely more expensive be sure to subscribe to this channel I my next backcountry cooking episode will hopefully be on cooking Bannock bread I was hoping to do that again last weekend until the burn ban came into effect I have a gluten free benek red red pea I was going to demonstrate with the cooking of both on an open flame and a pan like this or in a reflector oven like this I'll probably demonstrate the reflector oven option because it's a little more non-traditional but I'll show it's pretty easy to do over you know a typical campfire grill as well yeah been aggressively fun a fun thing to cook in the backcountry is one of our family's favorites so that episode of probably my next episode in backcountry cooking so please be sure to subscribe alright hope to hope so you can leave some comments below as well take care then it bred with [Music] hmm pretty good [Music]

Channel: Brad Mitchell Photography Outdoors

Views: 93,979

Keywords: Brad Mitchell Photography, www.bradmitchellphoto.com, twig stove, backcountry cooking, gasifier, twig, backpacking, cooking, backcountry, stove

Id: hZIqLs5Jdbg

Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2018