[pct-l] wood burning stove

[Steve McAllister]

Hi Diane,

My statements are very general and aren't true in many cases. They
also implied a small very just barely big enough to cook.

My stove("Little Dandy" style) can be fed without removing the pot.

I find that a lot of the flame gets blown away from the pot in a
breeze when I cook on a tiny open fire and so takes longer because of
the wasted heat. A fire can be directed without a stove with careful
placement of rocks though.

As far as my comparison of how long it takes to cook on a stove
compared to an open fire. I understand that a big open fire can boil
water pretty fast, but a fire that is small enough to use a handful of
sticks will usually boil water faster and more efficient if it can be
contained so that most of the flame reaches the bottom of the pot.

My stove is tiny enough that I can use the same windscreen I use with
my alky stove, but a stove that small does require that you feed twigs
into it from time to time over the 10 minutes it takes to boil the
water, but that is the price I pay to keep the weight down and be able
to use the smsll amount of dry fuel that I can find on a wet day.

I only recently started using a wood stove. I had always just built a
bigger fire and stuck the pot in the middle.
The stove just makes things go a little smoother, makes it so I don't
have to gather as much fuel and gives my a lot of the ease of use
benefits that I'd have using a heavier carried fuel stove.

It really wouldn't matter if I backpacked with a wood stove or not as
I have been cooking on wood fires my whole life and only rarely used a
stove when wood fires weren't allowed.

My stove folds flat and only weighs a few ounces so I don't notice the
added weight.
I can't say that for most wood stoves, they are usually bulky and
weigh too much.

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Diane at Santa Barbara Hikes dot com
<diane at santabarbarahikes.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 11, 2010, at 9:50 AM, pct-l-request at backcountry.net wrote:
>> 3) They can be more efficient by directing the fire energy to the
>> bottom of the pot. So you don't have to gather much fuel.
>
> I don't think this is true, at least not by my personal experience.
> With a stove, I have to constantly lift the pot and put in another
> couple of sticks. This ends up limiting the time the pot is in
> contact with the heat and expanding the number of sticks I have to
> use. With a fire, I just place the stove on the sticks and the water
> is hot really super fast. Even better is to wait for coals.
>
>>
>> 4) It is usually much quicker for a wood stove to boil water than
>> an open fire.
>
> Not my experience. But even if true, I have found that having water
> boil fast is not a priority for me. If my water boils in about the
> time it takes to set up my tent, and no faster, then I'm happy.
>
>>
>> 5) They are safer, especially when combined with a wind screen (which
>> I do use). Open fires can eject sparks that can be caught by the wind.
>
> This is probably true, but not guaranteed. I suppose if your tiny
> fire was small enough you could use a windscreen around part of it.
>
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... when your feeling blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's
nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
   -- Tom Waits

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