Backpacking Stoves I Wish I Tried Sooner!

what's better this or this now before you click off because you think you know the answer I thought I did too and if you're anything 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 bit curious about all the other types of stoves out there you got canister white gas alcohol wood burning solid fuel and probably some I'm not even thinking of and that got me thinking what if I'm missing something with one of these other types of stoves what if there's something better out there that I'm ignoring so I decided I would give them all a really good try and not just try them but rate them on ten point scale to see which is truly the best stove and I really thought I already knew the answer but a last minute Underdog really surprised me and in my U2 so let's check it out so I spent some time using and testing all these stoves primarily 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 down in the description I then rated each stove in each of these areas on a scale from one to five with five being the best so I want to go through and hit the pros and cons of each of these stoves starting with the popular MSR Pocket Rocket 2. now mine's actually the deluxe but it doesn't matter for this video this is standing in for all canister stoves out there and the great thing about canister stoves is they are pretty much foolproof with very little that can go wrong you screw on the canister you light the stove and you let it go it's fast boiling one cup of water in just over a minute it's lightweight it's Compact and it doesn't cost that much it's just fifty dollars most people are going to be using a stove like this which means fuel is readily available in most towns especially if there's really good trails nearby a few cons is they aren't that best in really cold weather they are a little noisy and you can't really ration out the fuel for instance if you only want to go on a one to two night trip you don't really need all the fuel that's in the canister almost all the other stoves I'm talking about today give you the ability to ration out smaller amounts of fuels and these canisters are somewhat wasteful if you just toss them once you're done but you can pick up a refill valve like I've talked about in another video all in all 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 little bit very similar to the pocket rocket are these jetboil chimney type stoves mine happens to be an MSR version the MSR wind burner these things have most of the same benefits of your standard canister stoves but are even faster thanks to the large windproof burners and they pack down neatly into themselves but these come with some significant drawbacks for one they are expensive approaching almost two hundred dollars you can only use the included pots or pots that are specifically designed to fit this stove and they are heavy with this one weighing in at one pound and eight ounces including the fuel these types of stoves come in fifth on my list very similar to both of these 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 you can actually convert to use either cancer stoves or white gas this is a useful stove if you want the ease of a canister stove but you want to take it into some really cold temperatures as you can flip the canister upside down 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 that's how we're going to test this one today like it's a white gas only stove some of the benefits to White gases it's easily available and you can often find it even when you can't find canister fuel white Gas Works well in cold weather too because of the way the stove is designed it passes the liquid fuel through the flame to atomize it before lighting it because of this you have to kind of prep the stove a little bit more you need to let a little bit of liquid fuel pool into the bottom of the stove and ignite it so that it can warm up the fuel inside the line if you've never done this before the whole process can be a little intimidating which is a definite Con in addition to that it's pricey at almost two hundred dollars it's heavy at almost two pounds including the fuel and it's not as clean as butane producing a little 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's prongs now that's probably not true of all white gas stoves but even without considering that this is still the worst stove on my list scoring only 18 points across 10 different categories okay so up to this point we've been talking about mainstream stoves the type of stuff you'll find at Big Box outdoor stores but the next several stoves you won't find at places like REI for these you need to check out garage grown gear because they specialize in hard to find Cottage gear offering a lot of gear you can't find anywhere else but even if you're more mainstream Backpacker because there's nothing wrong wrong with that garage grown gear is carrying more and more Brands every single day both mainstream and cottage Brands and that's the thing that makes garage growing gear unique is they aren't 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 check them out click on the link in description or go to garagesgrowngear.com thank you garage grown gear for sponsoring this video now people have been cooking using fire for years and before gas stoves good old wood burning fires were the way to go you may have seen one of the wood stoves that have the little B fan and USB charger that is powered by the heat from the fire that's basically the really expensive version of a simple wood burning stove like this one from tokes this is a super simple stove that uses Twigs from the forest as fuel obviously anywhere that there are trees you are likely to find plenty of fuel to feed your stove you might run into a little bit of an issue in high Alpine areas or in really wet conditions the stove is lightweight at just over 5 ounces and since you pick up sticks for fuel there's no fuel weight to worry about it's also relatively inexpensive at just 45 dollars but this is also the slowest stove that I tested it took me about three minutes just to get the fire going and then another five minutes to boil one cup of water and because it uses Twigs the fire can burn out relatively quickly requiring you to feed it more Twigs as you go to boil more than just a cup of water it's also pretty dirty with lots of soot caked onto the bottom of my toke's pot and it's the only stove that you couldn't blow out or turn off once you're done cooking based on my testing this was the second worst stove on my list one of the stoves that really surprised me was the S bit style solid fuel stoves I've got this Vargo titanium stove that's actually an alcohol stove on one side but you can flip it over and you can burn solid fuel tabs on the other side the thing that really surprised me about this was the weight this is the lightest stove on my list just 2.2 ounces including four fuel Taps that would be enough for me to cook for four different nights on the trail the stove itself is only 35 dollars which would make it the cheapest except you almost certainly are going to need some type of windscreen I picked up this 10 titanium windscreen by tokes bringing my total to forty five dollars all in now it does take a little bit longer to boil water taking almost five minutes to boil just one cup of water but there's basically no setup time and probably the worst part is the fuel availability I couldn't find any fuel tabs in my hometown and Amazon was going to take over a week to ship some to me so if you're needing to pick some up on a little bit of a longer hike on a resupply day you might have trouble finding fuel but the cool thing about this particular stove is if you can't find solid fuel you can still use it as an alcohol stove now for my testing I scored the solid fuel and the liquid alcohol as if they were two separate stoves and even though the alcohol stove took a little bit longer to boil water it edged out the solid fuel because of how readily available alcohol is you can find denatured alcohol at almost any hardware store and failing that you can use 91 isopropyl rubbing alcohol that can be found at just about any grocery store or Pharmacy this stove was 35 but lots of people build their own stoves out of beer cans or cat food cans and they're really fun and kind of cool to play with my biggest complaints about alcohol stoves are the slow cook times they take a little bit of time to Prime them to get them to put out full power and they are a little bit of a hassle to recapture the unused fuel but as I Was preparing to film this a guy from South Texas sent me this little pill bottle alcohol stove that He makes himself out of the same material used in pizza oven fire breaks it's just these small little stone tablets that you charge by soaking them in alcohol for about 10 minutes the night before or immediately after you use one so that it's ready to go for next time then when you're ready to cook you stack two of them on the small little metal disc and you light them on fire this thing thing really surprised me at how fast it was boiling a cup of water in less than three minutes with basically no setup time then once you're done blow them out and 30 seconds later the tablets are cool enough to touch it's lightweight with four fully charged tablets weighing in at just four ounces and it's the cheapest stove on my list costing just thirty nine dollars that includes four tablets a pill bottle a small titanium windscreen and the little metal disc that you set it on now as I was testing these I thought they were pretty cool but I didn't really think they'd do that much better than a regular alcohol stove so I was surprised when I added up my 10 point score assessment and saw that this little pill bottle stove scored the highest out of any of the stoves that I tested it's fast it's easy to use it's inexpensive it's lightweight it's readily available fuel quick to cool down clean burning Works in cold weather and you can adjust how much fuel you want to bring with you and that surprised me that this simple little alcohol stove could outperform my tried and true canister stove which I never would have known if I hadn't given it a try hey everyone future Steven here so after I filmed a lot of that I got a little bit more experience with this pill bottle stove and I had one issue one time where it tipped over on an even ground now I do think that was partly my fault because I didn't take the time to make sure that it was nice and well balanced but it also seemed to discharge the moment that it hit the ground like the ground somehow sucked all the alcohol out of the stone now I don't know what's going on there to be honest I need more time with it I'm going to knock a couple points off of it bringing it right in line with my MSR Pocket Rocket Deluxe and if I'm being honest even though I'm really intrigued by the stove I don't know that it's enough to get me to stop taking my tried and true Pocket Rocket okay back to the video I just want to give you that quick update now I do need to add that in some places canister stoves are the only stoves Allowed by law mainly due to fire dangers in the west as you can probably tell several of these stoves could easily start fires in the right condition so before you head out be sure to check your local laws regulations and conditions if you made it this far in the video do me a favor I was recently nominated for the best outdoor Vlog of the Year even though I wouldn't really call what I do vlogging either way I need your vote to win click on the link in the description and vote for whoever on that list you think is best hopefully it's me your support means the world to me be sure to like subscribe and do all those other things and as always thanks for watching of liquid fuel liquid fuel liquid fuel fuel

Channel: MyLifeOutdoors

Views: 2,190,663

Keywords: backpacking gear, alcohol stove, ultralight backpacking, camping, camp stoves, cooking, white gas, canister stove, wood burning stove, backpacking, msr, toaks, vargo, pillbottle stove, review, test, comparison

Id: ARwKxQ30oOI

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023