What Is Each Type Good For?
By Other Features
Weight: The lightest stoves are alcohol or chemical fuel tablet burners, followed by all the others, with wood or charcoal burners in the middle. If you need light weight, you can find a commercially made alcohol stove at about three ounces (85g), or make your own, as light as one-sixteenth ounce (less than two grams if you’re a smartypants).
Complexity: The simplest stoves are alcohol or chemical fuel tablet burners, followed by all the others, with wood or charcoal burners in the middle, again.
Yawn.
There is a tie for simplest stove of all: either a plain cup for burning alcohol, or a cross-shaped tablet burner that just holds the tablet a fraction of an inch (bare millimeters) up off the ground.
Mechanical reliability/repairability: The most reliable stoves are the simplest, and again these are alcohol or chemical fuel tablet burners, followed by wood or charcoal burners, then liquid burners, with pressurized stoves at the fussy end. If using an alcohol or tablet stove, you can carry a spare, or if you happen to fall on the damn thing you can probably bend it back into shape and keep using it. No parts to lose, no jets to clean.
Try running over your canister stove with a truck, and then bending it back into shape. Just try.
Heat output: The heavy liquid petroleum burners and wood-burning stoves come out on top here. Kerosene has a huge amount of heat tied up in its molecular structure, but again, wood is free and is just out there, lying on the ground, in infinite supply. Alcohol and solid tablets are relatively weak here, but lightweight backpackers have learned to compensate — they don’t need much. Compressed gas stoves fall in the middle.
Durability: This is a little bit of a puzzler. While commercially made liquid fuel stoves have a safety margin built in so they don’t wear out quickly or result in the fireball of death, and compressed gas stoves even more closely resemble lumps of solid metal (sans the fuel canister) you’d probably have to give the prize to the fuel tablet stoves.
Some of these are made from bent hardware cloth or simple sheets of machined titanium that hook together. Those would be almost impossible to bend, let alone destroy. Alcohol stoves tend to be made from aluminum drink cans, a delicate material at best, but because their designs are so simple they can still take a lot of abuse.
Nimblewill Nomad’s Little Dandy wood-burning stove is a collection of flat steel plates that hook together for use and fold flat again for storage. You could drive over that stove with a tank (several times in succession) and not hurt it.
Fuel availability: The most available fuel is garbage. That’s what wood is. Trees grow and shed dry wood the way humans shed dandruff and armpit hairs. It’s waste to them.
Wood-burning stoves can also burn cardboard, paper, grass, and anything else dry and solid. They win, no contest. Alcohol has to come in second, being available at every hardware store, department store and gas station.
Specially-formulated liquid stove fuels like white gas are common in the summer, sort of. Kerosene — well, when was the last time you tried to buy some? Canister fuels are available just about everywhere that sells anything but the most basic sporting goods. Solid fuel tablets? By mail order.
Stability during use: Some stoves are large. Some are small. Some are light. Some are heavy. Some are made in factories by specially bred and trained machines overseen by geniuses, and some are made in homes and garages by ordinary stumblebums. Each particular stove has its own characteristics, which interact with the terrain and weather where and when they are used. This one is a draw all the way around. It’s mostly up to the yokel using it.
Toxicity/danger: Pressurized liquid fuel stoves and compressed gas stoves are designed by experts and manufactured to close tolerances in modern factories. But these two types of stove are also the most dangerous. In other words, they have to be designed and built by experts. And that is why the factories are all situated well away from delicate living organisms. OK, that’s not strictly true, or even close, but... The connection between a fuel canister and its stove can be faulty, or the hose connecting a fuel bottle to its stove can leak. Either way you can get a blowtorch flaming into the sky, or a river of burning fuel running downhill toward your tent. Not for amateurs.
Liquid petroleum fuels are not good to eat or drink. Their vapors are not good to breathe. The particular fuel you use may have contaminants like benzene, a carcinogen, and none of this stuff is very good, not even a little bit. Compressed gases are probably purer overall, and not necessarily quite so toxic in themselves, but are still not good to breathe.
Wood could hurt you if you poke yourself in the eye, but that’s about it. Wood is made mostly of cellulose, a long-chain sugar. That about says it all. (This is true. Trees are made from sugar, sweetheart.)
Ethanol or grain alcohol is right next to wood on the safety chart, but you’ll probably be using a mixture containing up to 80% methanol (a.k.a. wood alcohol), and you can’t tell by looking at it or by smelling it. You don’t want to drink it. It can make you go blind, and then kill you.
Short of drinking it, you can absorb some through your skin while measuring it out. Aside from absorbing methanol through your skin there really isn’t too much danger. Assuming that you’re smart enough not to try drinking it just to see what really happens. When you go blind, you can’t see anything. Keep this away from children.
Solid fuel tablets, whether hexamine or trioxane, release substances such as formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide and nitrogen oxides when burned. Trioxane, mostly found in military or military-surplus fuel tablets, requires a hand washing after contact with the stuff, even if it’s not burned.
Hexamine appears safer to handle, though it can give off formaldehyde (an irritant and possible carcinogen) just from contact with perspiration. The “Material Safety Data Sheet” for this substance recommends “always wear protective equipment when handling this compound.” Hexamine (Esbit) is advertised as non-toxic. You have to decide if you personally agree with that.
Size: For those doing their gear selection exclusively at outdoor shops, pretty much all stoves are going look about the same. You’ll see liquid fuel stoves from MSR and other major manufacturers and the accompanying fuel bottles (about the size of large soft drink bottles). Canister stoves are smaller because they don’t have to vaporize and mix fuel that’s already in the vaporous state, but their fuel is contained in relatively large canisters you plug them into.
The smallest solid tablet stoves are almost not there at all, and homemade alcohol stoves are close behind, considering the tea candle cup stove at a weight of one-sixteenth ounce (1.8g), height of three-eighths inch (9.5 mm), and diameter of roughly one inch (25 mm).
In the usual vein of perversity, found everywhere that technology meets marketing, you won’t see alcohol, tablet or wood-burning stoves in outdoor shops. The very occasional shop may have a Sierra stove just for the sake of amusement, but that’s it. Considering that (with the exception of the Sierra stove) these three types of backpacking stove are among the smallest, cheapest and most innovative, you’d expect them to be available, but they aren’t.
Tradition, tradition, tradition.
Camping and backpacking stoves began as products that came from factories and were sold through long chains of wholesalers and retailers, and evolved into established features in the landscape of the outdoor world. People got used to them, used them, wrote reviews of them, saw friends and strangers alike using them, and by golly, we all thought that that was that. We just got dumb.
Some scruffy thru-hiker comes along with an alcohol stove he made from a couple of beer cans and what are we going to think? “Not familiar” means “no good”. “Not sold in stores” means “suspect”. Not appearing in glossy ads means nonexistent. “Everyone knows” that you can’t make a stove yourself. Duh.
Cost: Free, if you make it yourself. Look at a pressurized stove using either liquid fuel or compressed gas and you’re in the $40 to $175 range. Other stove types fall in between. Usually the lighter, lower-tech stove will be cheaper.
But you really can make your own stove. Yay!
Exercises
- Weigh yourself. Calculate how many half-ounce backpacking stoves you could be made into, if you were only made of the right stuff.
- Decide how complex you would be if you were a stove. Wearing a tinfoil hat may help to get you into the mood.
- How reliable are you? Do you burst into flame at the touch of a match, first time, every time? We thought not. Write about it.
- Are you hot? Really? Then try bringing 16 ounces of 40-degree water to a boil in six minutes. Confess. It will be good for you. You aren’t hot after all, are you?
- Durability. If I ran over you with a tank, could you still make tea? List all reasons for your answer and discuss the advantages of having a handle and/or a spout. Hum along if possible.
- Are you available, worldwide?
- What about stability? Can you remain upright in a stiff breeze, on rocky ground, or do you tip over a lot and spill your contents? If you think you’re stable, do you achieve this on account of sheer overall massiveness, of the weight in your lower half, or because of your subtle and artistic design?
- Are you toxic? If someone licked you, would they make a face like Mr. Yuk? Would they die?
- What about size then, hmmm?
- How much? I mean how much do you cost and/or charge? Are you within reach of the working man? Just a plaything for the rich? Pretty reasonable? Reasonable but not that pretty? Free?