What is the best backpacking stove?

hey everybody dustin here from back country cuisine and today we're answering the question what is the best camp stove to buy what is the best camp stove to buy ever it depends there's no easy answer for this one it depends on what you want ask some questions like where what kind of camping do you want to do and then we're going to try to narrow it down a little bit because there's a lot to choose from these are all my stoves um you might say i've got a lot of stoves you might say i've got a stove problem hi my name is dustin and i have a stove problem okay so let's start off with some basics let's just talk about the the different types of stoves so there's i put them into four categories number one white gas stoves so there's a lot of different ones but basically what you've got is a liquid fuel you fill up a liquid fuel into your bottle that is delivered over to your stove it heats up your stove and you start burning but because it starts off as a liquid got to prime your strobe you got to heat it up to the point where that liquid gas turns into a vapor gas some really great advantages it's super hot puts out a lot of energy for uh per ounce of fuel disadvantages tends to be really heavy a little bit more expensive than a lot of the other stoves out there too number two very popular stoves out there they are canister stoves so they use these little camp canisters and what these are this is a compressed gap burn nice and blue and nice and clean right off the bat mount you can light it right from here you're cooking within seconds lots of options this one's called a remote canister stove and then there aren't sit on top stoves so you literally screw your stove right onto the fuel bottle the fuel bottle becomes your stand for the stove and you have canister system stove still using canisters the cook pot is specifically built for that stove this is uh the jetboil very common uh canister stove system you are super tall and it gets really heavy so tipping becomes more of an issue with these kinds of stoves they typically have some little heat exchangers down here which helps to increase the efficiency and next in line would be alcohol stoves you have some sort of metal container you put the fuel in there you light it and you start cooking so this is something you can buy really easily at grocery stores you can buy it at i also also recommend getting denatured alcohol not the rubbing alcohol rubbing alcohol creates a normal mess so that's an alcohol stove advantages of alcohol stoves super lightweight usually get them from much cheaper than the other ones number four is the wood burning stove so this is a stove which has no fuel with it you're not going to carry any fuel with you but you need to find it on the trail so on the trail you would get to camp and you'd find a bunch of little sticks some of these pine needles for burning you put them in here you'll light it up and then you can start cooking with it so these are great because you don't carry any fuel that's pretty awesome you pick it up on the trail disadvantages are they tend to be a little bit heavier than some of the stoves not all of them certainly lighter than white gas um they tend to be a little bit more finicky like you first of all you've got to have dry wood well you don't get dry wood in the spring and fall sometimes so that's going to be a little tricky sometimes you have to bring extra tools with you to get wood into the right size usually you can just burn these little sticks that are sticky sticking around if you're in an area where there's a lot of or there's very little fuel well then that's not gonna work well they can get really heavy and really fancy if you go with a biolite stove those are the four types of camp stoves let's talk about what's right for you first question i like to ask people is are you planning on winter camping do you want to go out when there's snow on the ground and it's super cold and you have to melt snow for your water if that's true if that's what you want to do i highly recommend getting a white gas stove energy output for the fuel is better than anything else out there you're getting white gas stoves in general my favorite for winter camping you can get by with a canister stove system i certainly have seen people do it you will end up in a situation where you can't use up typically you can't use up your full fuel bottle or better yet is to get one of these remote canister stoves the reason why remote canister stoves are better in the winter is that i told you about that fuel sometimes you can't get all that liquid fuel in there but because it's liquid if you turn the canister upside down like this then that liquid fuel will still come through the fuel line and burn fine in your in your burner head if you're going to go winter camping white gas propane remote canister canister yourself all right question number two are you trying to go ultra light you want to get as lightweight as you possibly can then you basically have two options there as well number one alcohol stoves no doubt about it the lightest weight stove system out there is an alcohol stove it is amazing you can use any kind of this is just a cat food can right and so you just fill it with fuel light it you can make your own gear out of aluminum foil so you have a windscreen you've got a heat reflector at the bottom and you need some sort of pot support so i often use this little hardware cloth put your pot on top bam you're cooking right so easy very very very lightweight many of these systems your whole stove with windscreen and heat reflect i mean everything can be less than five ounces so super super light second lightest on there will be a room a canister stove that sits on top this is my current favorite canister stove so this is the msr pocket rocket deluxe burner head itself is only a few ounces i think it's three ounces or something like that so that's really light the problem is the canister so the canister can weigh quite a bit a full one of these canisters weighs 13 ounces that's almost a pound whereas and i can't i think the other thing that's really key about this is i can't pre-measure out how much fuel i'm going to use so if i'm going to go for one night or two nights this is way too much fuel yeah i can get a smaller canister way more expensive and also it's still really heavy it's still going to be at least a half a pound even for the smaller canister it's actually a little more than half a pound with alcohol i can use a plastic container like this or even smaller like this the cancer itself weighs about an ounce and then i can decide exactly how much fuel to put in i can put in one ounce a few two three four depends how many meals i'm gonna cook and so i can be very specific about how much weight i get in my pack i really like the alcohol stoves especially for shorter trips so for ultralight i recommend an alcohol stove a little bit heavier canister stove sit on top canister stove now what if you want the easiest stove possible you just this is maybe your first stove you've ever used before you're that's pretty much canister stoves canister stoves are the easiest things to deal with you turn it on you light it you start cooking right away and you turn it off and you take it apart and it's it's just super easy you can be cooking in five minutes stick it on turn it on light it bam that's it done all right what if you're cheap what if you don't have a lot of money what if you don't want to be spending 60 bucks for one of these or a hundred bucks for one of these then the cheapest stove by far are alcohol again alcohol the very first alcohol stove i ever used was this one right here this is a homemade beer can stove but it'll last for a while um but you will need to replace it but we're talking about 10 cents right and then you take some aluminum foil you get your heat reflector you can make a windshield out of a out of aluminum foil so alcohol definitely the cheapest stove system out there even if you want to buy one from a company who makes them so anywhere around 20 to 30 bucks if you want to buy one and less than a dollar if you want to make your own so seriously you can have a stove for less than a dollar it's not going to work in the winter time alcohol stoves are not good for the winter as long as you have to melt snow with it i think that's the key part because this just doesn't put out enough heat all right what if you're into fancy cooking you want to make pancakes you want to simmer you want to make rice the white gas stoves these things are hard to adjust a canister stove it's much easier to turn it down so you can get a nice small flame simmer with a little bit better it also has a slightly wider head so that the flames are a little bit more spread out they do make white gas stoves there's something called the dragonfly from msr that you can do a really good job at simmering with it's quite a bit more expensive it's about 150 dollars for that stove versus 100 for the stove and it's really heavy but you can do a lot of simmering with it so if you're not if you want to do winter camping and you want to do fancy cooking maybe look at something like the dragonfly now what if you're looking to boil water as fast as you possibly can these system stoves are amazing they're actually designed to put out more heat bottom of the pot has this these little ridges on there and it's called the heat exchanger what it does is as the flame comes up hits the bottom of the pot and spreads out or that flame goes through the heat exchangers and all the surface area of that metal conducts into the bottom of your pot again and that'll make your water boil faster otherwise any of these canister stoves they do a great job at putting out a lot of heat really fast boiling water quick what if you want to be environmentally friendly what if you're looking to try to minimize your impact as much as you possibly can well i'm going to start with the negative side and i'm going to move to the positive side if you want to be as environmentally friendly as possible stay away from canister stoves these things are they use a lot of metal you can't reuse them you can't refill them a lot of places won't even recycle the canister so you have to throw them away sometimes they also use a petroleum-based fossil fuel then we get to white gas fuels now the nice thing about white gas fuels is that you can reuse your canisters so this canister is actually about 20 years old for me petroleum-based fuel though alcohol definitely easy and all alcohol as far as i know all alcohol products like the denatured alcohols are made from corn that's a renewable resource alcohol is pretty darn green also because a lot of the times if you're making your own these are recycled products these wood burning stoves are pretty awesome because you're just taking material off the ground that you can burn and that material would decompose naturally that carbon dioxide gets released back out into the atmosphere as well so you still have to mind the resources to make the stove it's pretty green this one here the bio light a lot more goes into this one so it's probably not quite as environmentally friendly but the battle light's nice because you can also charge your phone or but about two pounds to carry one of the wood burning stoves you get a lot of soot on the bottom of your your pot and that gets everywhere you get what if you want a stove that does it all it does everything it'll it'll burn white gas when you need to go winter camping it'll burn propane or the the canister fuel like the butane if you want to go and just have something really quick and easy um a little bit lighter weight all that kind of stuff they do make some stoves that are pretty close but you can't have it all there are some stoves out there the msr whisper light universal allows you to attach either a white gas canister or these isobutane canisters so that's kind of nice so you can have the easy for some trips and you can have the winter camping really efficient for the liquid fuel but these stoves will cost you somewhere between 150 250 dollars i mean they are expensive and you're still not going to get all the features you're just going to get going to get a lot hopefully you now have a better sense of what kind of stove is going to work best for you if you're anything like me i have 30 stoves and i pick the right one for the right trip take care everybody eat well and come visit us at backcountrycuisine.net see ya you

Channel: Backcountry Cuisine

Views: 319

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: backpacking, camp stoves, ultralight, camping

Id: gdKvZC2Sfhs

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020