Ikea Hobo Stove VS Vegetable Steamer Stove

in this video we're going to compare to DIY but IKEA's Hobo stove and the vegetable steamer so if you're interested keep watching so this is another viewer suggested idea for comparing two stoves together and I thought this was a great idea because each of these stoves can be made very inexpensively from readily available materials in my case I like to purchase them at Value Village one of our thrift stores but they can be purchased inexpensively from either a grocery store or from Ikea so we're gonna break this test down into two categories first we'll look at the stoves themselves we'll look at their weight their size their bulk their compact miss when they're in your pack and we'll also look at things like versatility then we'll go over to the performance of the stoves when we get fires going in them and we'll look at how long does it take for each of these stoves to bring two cups of water to a boil we'll also look at how long it the amount of wood lasts in a fire in each of these stoves and I'm sure we'll find a few other things to talk about as well okay let's get to opening these stoves up and taking a closer look at them okay here are the two stoves in their stuff sexes and they're compacted form the way I would carry them in my backpack and on the surface it would appear that the vegetable steamer stove is going to be a much more compact thing to put in your pack but what you see right now really doesn't tell the whole story then now it was Blaine what I mean in a minute so very quickly let me just assemble the IKEA Hobo stove so here's my stove and inside here I also have the pot which the stove stores in quite nicely so let's put the stove together very quickly and play feed out okay and this stove I should turn it around so you can see does have the cut feed port on the front of it as well all right let's just talk about the IKEA Hobo stove I know it's appeared in a lot of the videos so far but I just want to go over it very quickly as far as cost goes I'm giving the stove itself including the pot in this case a nominal figure of five dollars because everything here with the exception of the feet themselves were all picked up secondhand so the cost to you will depend on what it's what you can get your materials for and if you have the tools that you can make one of these stoves and I do have videos on my channel if you're interested on how to make an IKEA Hobo stove so the pot I'm using with this setup is a 13 centimeter Pont that I did pick up at the thrift store and the reason I'm using this part well two reasons one the stove fits down inside just nicely but also the par don't we'll be using with the other stove is a 13 centimeter wide pot and it's important that I try to get parts of roughly the same as close to the same size so that the it doesn't have too much of an impact on the boil time so let's put that aside size and weight well I'm gonna put in the show notes below all the information as well as the size and everything else but basically the stove itself comes in at 325 grams and or 11.4 ounces and the reason I mentioned stove by itself is because this is the way this one is built out I often use them with different pots so I didn't think it would be fair to include the pot in the weight so 325 grams or eleven point four ounces bulk factor yes they're a little bit bulkier than other stores like the Ember lid or the firebox and that they fold so flat but if you range everything correctly like I do with this one inside of my pot I put my fire kit and other things down inside of the stove so it takes up less and less space when you're the more efficiently you pack everything alright now let's and versatility let's talk about versatility for a second of course a stove is most versatile when it can be used with other than wood by itself so this can be used very well with an alcohol stove and I have the video showing how to use an alcohol stove with the kiai utensil strainer but it can also be used with wood pellets and charcoal and I have videos on those that worked very well with both of those so that adds to the versatility of the stove not all stoves work well with either wood pellets or charcoal this one does now let's put it aside okay the vegetable steamer stove now I'm going to be using a brand new one today this was sent to me by one of my viewers thank you very much they had what appeared to be a rather nice quality vegetable steamer so this one has not seen fire before but it you know it's a tentacle in size never to the one I have in my earlier videos but the vegetable steamer stove in this case has full dough legs they don't all sometimes they just have little post legs I like that this one does have those fold-out legs makes for a little bit more compact usage and it folds up now how are you going to use this stove I have a complete video maybe maybe two videos on using this vegetable steamer as a wood stove but that's one of the things we need to talk about because it does impact the versatility to start with the most basic way to use this as a stove is to have some type of a grill I've got a trivet and yes I know this is probably a chrome plated trivet so it will release gases into the air it's good thing I'm using of doors alright so I like to put that right on top you can open the stove up well here's one thing you can do with this you can open it up all the way and have almost like a little bonfire in your stove if you want to use it that way and I'll show you how you can still use it like this and submit suspend a pot over it in a minute the way I'm probably going to use it most often is to set it up like this and this works out very nice first over it has a huge surface area of fire so that it heats up a law very quickly but you can even narrow this in if you want and even focus the flame even more and I have a little modification that I did pick up from another viewer that shows how to do this to create a modification or at least they showed something very similar I have kind of put my own spin on it so in its most basic fashion this is how the stove is set up I'll show the alternative pot supports parts of pension suspensions in a second but I want to talk about versatility I have don't believe I've used charcoal in one of these but I have used wood pellets to grate a fat wood pellets work extremely well in this type of the stove yes oh so do alcohol stoves now they you can't use them the same way you could use them inside of the IKEA it's a lot more difficult to get the exact height adjustment with this for an alcohol stove one way you could do it of course is if you could raise or lower the alcohol stove inside now primarily I'm talking about at transia or one of its knockoffs but I think in my opinion is that this vegetable steamer works best as a windscreen so if you're using a an alcohol stove something like one of the wick stoves like the cat stove or the tuna can stoves those type of things where you can set the pot right down on top of it because they're lower inside you're going to get a windscreen effect and there's just enough air holes through all around the outside of the that that's the vegetable steamer that it will work well you know for airflow and for windscreen protection at the same time so yes you can it just gets a little bit more challenging to figure out how your best going to do that with this this item alright I said I would show you a couple of other ways of using this put that grill aside here's the modification I created and I'll explain why this is made from utility strapping or sometimes called plumbers strapping for hanging pipes on the underside of joists in a house I took a length of it I have a little Chicago screw it doesn't have to be that it doesn't have to be utility strapping this is just what I had to do this with and I made it to the size where I could put it on the outside of the pot or outside of a vegetable steamer and that restricts it from opening up any further now why would you want to do that I guess if you're worried that if you're going to set a pot on top of this and the thing is going to spread open on you then this is a good idea this will keep it from opening up any further it just you know it totally restricts it and that would be good if you have a grill or something that you want to put on top that doesn't have any means of preventing it from opening up further there is an alternative method there's another video I don't know who has that video but I'm sure it can be found where the tabs on the underside can be bent a little bit and that also restricts it from opening up any further but then you're restricted to exactly that at the amount that you've bent those tabs for restrict this I like the idea of being able to open it up all the way or close it down to almost as close as I can and something like this is where it's just perfect let's leave it like this position for a second here's an alternative method and I have used this with this stove this is one of those inexpensive Coggins grills that you can pick up for a few dollars they don't last a long time but the hair effect if they do work well they're easy to pack and this Coggins grill will suspend a pot or you can grill right over top of this which makes it another multi-use item that you can carry in your pack you can you will rate over an open fire or you can set it up over a stove like this I do have one other I'm not sure it's gonna fit in the video I think I just will have to rearrange the camera and show you this other item another way of suspending a pot over top of this stove now what I did want to show you and the way we're going to use it today is with this grill on top here's the part that I'm going to be using so this pots appeared at least one other video it's just another one of the dollar store fines excuse me a thrift store fines I believe it was either a flower container earth or a sugar container and I was able to put a wire bail on it and it works quite well for an inexpensive pot that for testing like this or for use in the woods as well it's a good size all right now let me just rearrange the camera and I'll show you how another means of suspending a pot over the vegetable steamer all right I'm trying to capture everything in frame just to show you what I have so I'm gonna take the grill off that it would normally use so what I have is a very inexpensive collapsible tripod cooking tripod I saw this on eBay and I thought I'd give it a shot it wasn't very expensive I haven't done a review on this by itself I have some mixed opinions on it now but I'll share that in another video still it does have some value so I'll share that with you now so it basically is there are three legs and three sections for each leg let's screw together and there's a small top plate in here that accepts all three legs it has an adjustable chain length here and that's how you use it with something like this so if I had a fire in my little vegetable steamer I could put the pot on adjust the height to where I want it will stay right there and there's a pin that goes through the links of the chain and holds it where you want to it works it works actually quite well for a pot of water you won't be able to put suspended a Dutch oven or anything too heavy from this because I find that it's a little bit shaky the legs you have to make sure that they stay together and they won't support a lot of weight they start to bend a little bit because the construction is all aluminum let me just show you through very quickly what I think of it compact lightweight convenient saves cutting down and make them having sticks that you have to use so if you're in a place where you can't find a few sticks to create a tripod this works it's not very high you can't use it over a large part you could use it easy over a small fire or like I'm doing over stove like this it is made of aluminum the threads I think over time if you're not careful you run the risk of stripping them so you do have to be cautious when you're putting together that you don't cross thread and strip the threads anyway yeah that's pretty much what I would say in a review but I'll probably show it in use over a fire at some point now let's get back to putting these two stoves together and creating fire okay I have the two stoves set up on my cement block here in my backyard my backyard laboratory and I have the same amount of what I just want to speak to the wood and the layout of the wood in the two stoves for a second I have set up the Kia Hobo stove in the way I do with most of the tests and that is everything is vertically aligned inside of the stove to create what will eventually look like a Swedish fires torture Canadian candle it's not truly a top bound burn because the fire lighter is going to drop down inside a little bit and kind of work from the center outwards and up at the same time with most of the other stoves I try to accomplish exactly the same thing however if that would not work well with the vegetable steamer stove so I've created this small log cabin same amount of wood but a small log cabin so once I get it lit I'll be able to close this up around the fire and it will contain it nicely and I think make the maximum use of the space in the design of this stove is it truly a fair test and fair comparison probably not because I could probably get a few more sticks in the IKEA and I could certainly get a lot more wood inside of the vegetable steamer but the idea here is to show you what it looks like with a fire in the same you know the wood is just one of those very that I can control and so if that's why I wanted to be able to use the same amount of wood same type of wood and both of them alright enough talk let's get these fire started so today I am using same as I've done in the number of tests this is the very inexpensive money for sure I got these probably the dollar store wax impregnated pair board fiber type fire starters they're great for doing these tests because you know they work they were further for the costume they work quite well so let me get the IKEA one lift and drop down inside they can be high rego fixes sometimes it takes a second to get them to light I'll drop that down side let that start working sometimes I put wood chips on top of these but I find you know it might take a few seconds longer to go without the wood chips but they go and I'm gonna cut away while they start to engage anyway now the other one I'm going to light it and I'm going to slide it into my log cabin type of arrangement here then I'll close the sides up a lot around it that seemed to work slide that into my log cabin close the sides up and let's not forget to put the grills on before they get too hot to manage or the pot supports in this case okay it'll take a few minutes before the fire and each of these stoves gets to a point where they're ready to put the pot on and when that happens I'll bring it back okay it's been five minutes since I lit the fire so just drop them down inside both stoves appear to be ready for the water to be put on top I'm noticing that the breeze is picking up in the backyard here so I'm likely gonna have to put the wind screen around and both of these choses I do the test I am just waiting now before putting the wind screen up until I put the pots on because once I put the wind screen on a wind screen around its likely going to make it harder for you to see what's happening but I'll reposition the camera then so both of them are engaging really well don't forget the glove mark this is hot two cups of water on top of the IKEA and two cups of water on top of the vegetable steamer now the vegetable steamer right away you can all that let's start the timer before we talk mark come on phone here we go sorry alright timer started so what I wanted to say was the and in this case the IKEA has a more concentrated flame right to the bottom of the pot which is nice you don't have a lot of flame coming out around that's not not directing its heat onto the pot not this not the same with the vegetable steamer it has more open space around the pot means great ventilation but you're losing some of the heat around the sides of the pot we'll see if it - how much of an effect it has on it my experience has been 3 minutes 4 minutes max and we'll have boiling water inside the IKEA we'll see how long it takes to work inside of the vegetable steamer yeah it looks like I'm gonna have to put the wind screen around - folks ok I'll bring it back when it comes to boiling time oh yeah the fire is hot today hard rolling boil in just three minutes 5 seconds see if I can get over and check this other one without getting burnt and it's rolling boil - alright that's kind of interesting looks to be pretty much a tie in terms of how long it took to bring water to a boil two cups of water to a boil in each of these stoves and let's remove the pots take a look at what's taking place inside and after that we'll wait to see how long the wood actually lasts like one pot off so quite a bit of wood in there as you can see the other pot off it's still quite a bit of wooden there as well well that's kind of cool okay I will bring you back when these things have gone to the point of flame out and we'll see how long that took okay sixteen minutes since I lit the two wood stoves we have flame out in the vegetable steamer we still have flame in the IKEA Hobo stove it is starting to die down but it's still active and it's still producing a lot of heat actually both them are producing a lot of heat this would be a great time to grill some hot dogs or steaks or sausages or chicken or whatever I guess over top of the vegetable steamer that's probably one of the versatility factors that it has over the IKEA is its grilling surface it's got to be twice the the surface area that you can put things on if that's the way you want it to use all right we'll wait a little while longer and to these things that burnt down to a point where I can handle them and then we'll have some closing comments okay a few closing thoughts on the Kia Hobo stove versus the vegetable steamer stove there's some interesting results there let's talk about the performance to begin with so the performance was quite comparable both stoves brought two cups of water to a boil in just over three minutes three minutes I think it was in five seconds that's great performance that's probably the fastest I've ever seen this either of these stoves bring water to a boil would burn out the wood did burn out a little faster in the vegetable steamer stove but it's not much faster than it did in the IKEA Hobo stove so that was kind of interesting let's see there's an interesting thing that took place that I didn't expect to see but I think I can explain it I'm gonna show you a close-up of the IKEA Hobo stove and hopefully you can see that the aluminum pot stand that I created for this started to melt now if you can refer back in the video to where just before I put the pots of water on how hard the wind was blown I mean not really hurt but hard enough that it was time to turn both of these stoves into small forges there was an intense amount of heat coming out of them and even after I put the one screen on there was a lot of heat being produced by these two stoves that's probably as I said the hottest I've seen either one of these stoves burn and it was due to the wind it raises an interesting point about especially the IKEA stove I did have a viewer talk to me or send me some comments I guess one of the other videos about how these are inefficient because of all the holes there's too much air flow going through these it does mean for a very quick burn it does mean for a very hot burn and maybe too hot he talked about putting some strap or some facing around the outside of the stove restricting the number of holes that air can be drawn in do you know I am gonna do some experiments with that and I thank you and I don't recall your name right now but I thank you for that because it's prompted me to do exactly that to see what I can do to modify and slow the burn down a little bit on the IKEA Hobo stove what else can I say so long-term durability that's obviously an impact on their kit now the stove itself is just fine it has withstood the heat I don't see any degradation of the stove itself and I suspect it will continue to work it's the pot stand that I'm gonna have to change up for something different all right trying to balance the two of these as I bring this one up the vegetable steamer stove it worked performed beautifully I was actually quite impressed it's a little stiffer in the opening and closing now than it was before hand but that's to be expected that's not I don't see any warping no damage to the stove at all so that's just a little bit of the soot that's got between the the folding plates here let's talk about performance in terms of versatility I think in this case it's a matter of difference what is that you're looking for for a straight up boil you can't beat the IKEA this is the faster of the two stoves that proved it well and actually it didn't prove that it showed that the the boil time is so very close together most of the time this is a faster stove this one I can't get over how well it worked out today in terms of the boil time was pretty much identical to the IKEA what this does have in terms of versatility is its ability to grill with more than twice the surface area you can do grilling you can put a larger pot on and still get enough contact with the flame to to that it doesn't extend over the sides like it might with the the Ikea so this actually showed itself very well now if I didn't mention this earlier and I think I failed to mention the weight of the vegetable steamer so I will annotate that into the earlier part of the video if I haven't done so already and one of the things I mentioned the boat bursts are failed to mention both versatility inside its little stuff sack this one did look more compact but you have to remember it did not come with a pot included so you're gonna have to carry your pots separately well that gives you the options of carrying all kinds of pots and using all kinds of utensils fry pans whatever you want on this I haven't tried Dutch oven on this I don't think that's what this is intended for but you know just about anything else I think you can put on this and and it'll work just fine the other thing with first utility is you do have to have a pot stand but I suppose this gives you the option of using different part stands such as the the cardoons grill or the tripod they loom in a tripod okay I don't know what else to say cost-wise they're both right on power you know next to nothing depending in what you can find them for in a thrift store performance-wise they seem to work very well both of them I am just a little III have to say I'm a little disappointed with what I saw here with the aluminum maybe I should have expected that I've not just not had it happened before with these stoves so now I'm on the hunt for something for an alternative that can withstand higher heats okay that's all I have to say both these two shows I open it up to you for your comments what did you think of this test what would you do differently what other types of tests would you like to see put those in the comment section below and of course until I see you again get out and explore and take that path less travel it will make all the difference bye for now

Channel: Mark Young

Views: 21,134

Rating: 4.9386711 out of 5

Keywords: Mark Young, Shunpyke Bushcraft, bushcraft, woodscraft, survival, hiking, fishing, camping, hunting, foraging, DIY, homemade, make it yourself, cooking, plant identification, wild medicinals, medicinal plants, edible plants, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Blue Mountain Birch Cove Wilderness, product reviews, primitive skills, firecraft, hobo stove, wood stove, twig stove, ikea hobo stove, vegetable steamer stove, stick stove, camp stove, diy stove

Id: R-xykkZhwXw

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 24 2019