General Stove Use
To use these stoves, you’ll need a pot stand, wind screen, and a ground reflector. The wood gas stove does not need a pot stand, because it has one built in, and you may or may not need a wind screen for it because it puts out a huge amount of heat. In any case, it requires a heavier wind screen that is open at the top. Regular aluminum foil isn’t adequate for the kind of heat this stove puts out.
Sixteen ounce aluminum cup as pot, with homemade foil lid, ready to cook over DOSIP stove.
The small cap from a 12 ounce plastic drink bottle will hold 0.25 ounce (7 ml) of alcohol. Two caps full will give you about enough fuel to bring 16 ounces (473 ml) of water to boiling temperature, depending on water temperature, air temperature, wind, and so on.
As mentioned earlier, I use a Platypus brand half-liter plastic bladder to carry fuel, and it works fine. With these things you can squeeze excess air out of the bladder before stuffing it into your pack. The cap is a little nicer than usual too.
Place the ground reflector down on a stable, level spot, put the stove on it, and then the pot stand. Set your pot on the stand, use your hand to rock it back and forth to see how stable it is. Relocate as needed until you find the best place.
Remove the cooking pot and the pot stand. Add water to the pot, unfold the wind screen, and get matches or lighter ready.
Add fuel to the stove and light it. Verify that there really is a flame there, which can be hard in bright sunshine. (And cold alcohol is sometimes annoyingly hard to light.) Then set the pot stand over the stove, set the pot on the pot stand, and cover it all with the wind screen.
Let it run and wait.
Water steaming and boiling over KittyCat stove (would usually have lid and wind screen in place).
Stay near the stove while it’s burning, but not so close that you can accidentally kick it over with a careless move. Check on the stove by holding a bare wrist well above the vent hole in the wind screen. You should feel plenty of hot gases coming up through the top. Normally the stove exhaust won’t be quite hot enough to burn you, but it can hurt. Don’t take chances. When the stove burns out you’ll still feel some heat, but barely any.
If you see steam coming out of the wind screen vent, that means that the water in the pot is boiling. No surprise there. Maybe you wanted to boil water, but if you didn’t plan on it, this means that you’ve put too much fuel in the stove, or the water you started with was warmer than you thought, or it’s just a warmer day, and you didn’t really need all the fuel that you put into the stove.
Wood gas stove burning with partially open wind screen. Wal-Mart Grease Pot on top.
We’re talking ultralight stoves here, in case you haven’t noticed yet, which means that you are concerned with every bit of weight. Burning more fuel than you need means that you have to carry it, which means useless weight in your pack. On the other hand, if you calculated your fuel down to the last drop and you’re wasting it turning water into steam, then you’ll go hungry later on, after you run out of fuel.
As you get tuned into the needs of your stove you’ll be able to guess just about exactly how much fuel to use. The fuel should burn out just before the water in the pot comes to a rolling boil. Sometimes you even want not-so-hot water, in which case you get to use even less fuel.
Letting the stove burn out also means that there is no excess fuel to get rid of, and therefore you can’t accidentally spill burning fuel when you take the pot off the stove. For the sake of safety you should let the stove burn out by itself before removing your pot from it.
If you really screwed up and have to do something with a boiling pot, try pulling off the wind screen. Be sure to wear your gloves for this, or use a pot gripper. The wind screen can be extremely hot. Removing the wind screen will let more heat dissipate and will lower the temperature of the pot a bit. If the pot had been in danger of boiling over, this should take care of it. Do this and then just wait until the fuel burns out before going to the next step in your cookery.
Left: Gooseberry Patch 16-ounce cup (1.9 ounces). Right: Wal-Mart Grease Pot (5 ounces if you remove the lid knob).
Exercises
- Look up:
Zen Seeker’s Zen Backpacking Stoves at http://bit.ly/9fZe6O
Sgt. Rock’s Ion stove (archived) at http://bit.ly/N4hnuu
Wings stove archives (archived) at http://bit.ly/Ky5fA7
Mark Jurey’s Penny Stove at http://bit.ly/ysr3GE or http://bit.ly/NpuILG - Make a simple alcohol stove and try it.
- Experience joy.
- Confess that you’re a convert, and build the next stove that looks interesting.
- Repeat.