First Look: Backpackinglight.co.uk Titanium Stoves

I’m siting here eating dehydrated curry which is 10 months old for my lunch. A bit past it’s prime but eatable (I hope). The reason? I’ve been playing with Bob’s new titanium stoves and I thought I’d share some fist impressions. Apologies in advance. This is going to sound like weird Darren at the height of his powers.

Alcohol Hybrids

In a recent post I talked about using these stoves in the Pyrenees. Here I was attracted by them as wood burning stoves with the option of using them as an alcohol frame and windshield if I hit bad weather.

But for this post I’m thinking UK and TGO Challenge and that means looking at things the other way around. How do these work as alcohol stove frames primarily, giving you the option of burning wood if the weather gives us the chance.

So, I bought a load of gear together. There were a number of pots, including: an MSR Kettle, a Ti Kettle from Vargo, the Mountain Laurel Designs pot and some kind of unbranded pot that Bob gave me years ago — wider and taller than the Ti and the MLD designs.

On the alcohol stove front I gathered together three stoves that I have used often, the Caldera Cone burner, the Whitebox stove and the Vargo Triad stove. (Hmm, just finished the food — if I’m dead tomorrow you’ll know why!)

Now, I’m not going to get too technical with you here — that might come later — but I did arrange a kind of control using my standard kit of recent years.

Caldera Reference

Over the last two years my standard alcohol kit has been a Caldera Cone system (actually two as I have one for a two person pot and one for the MLD pot). The Caldera is a very fuel efficient system. I boiled up 400 mls of water in the cone — which is actually quite a lot, away more than you would need for a hot drink for example.

The backpacking light.co.uk stoves

I set out to try both the titanium Honey Stove (which can be used in large or a compact format) and the new pocket Stove. If you have a Honey Stove you will be familiar with the module design and it’s flat panel design.

The Pocket Stove

This was the first time that I have looked at the Pocket Stove. The stove comes in some lovely packaging, a meal tin with a colour design embossed into it. As you take it out of its envelope it feels like a quality product and not like a cottage industry product.

The stove is a simple design. There are three side plates, one ‘door’ and a base plate which can fit into one of two height positions. If you loved Meccanno as a kid assembling this will be easy. But even if you are clumsy like me you will have it together in no time.

Once assembled you have a rock solid stove that sits nicely above the ground. But of the alcohol stoves that I own only the Vargo Triad really fits. Apparently, the Evernew Titanium Stove sits in there very nicely but I’ve never found the need to get out and buy one. I have played with the Evernew though and its accompanying wind shield. I’ve no doubt from what I’ve seen so far that an ever new Burner and Pocket Stove will be far superior in use than the complete Evernew system. it is sturdy and far less fiddly and easier to load up with wood.

The Honey Stove

Just like the original Honey Stove but half the weight. It comes with six sides and a door, two base plates (one for the large configuration and one for the smaller square config), an adapter to hold a Trangia burner and a stainless steel grill — very popular with bushcraft folks who like nothing better than to stride out into the wilderness and cook supermarket beef burgers/patties!

The Honey Stove is an ingenious design but it always felt heavy to me. Just weighing it up in my hand this was not something I wanted to carry in my pack. The titanium version in half the weight but in the hand it feels a magnitude lighter than that. Most weight conscious backpackers will just pick this up and think, yep this is about right. For my backpacking test I assumed that I wouldn’t carry with me the trangia holder or the grill and this obviously takes the weight down. I’d also thought that I would probably only ever use the stove in Square format.

First Results

Amazingly it is the full Honey Stove configuration that has impressed me the most (though the Pocket Stove may be the most useful — see below).

First up I place the Caldera Cone burner in the full honey stove, simply just sitting it on the base plate. A pot was suspended above it using two thin titanium pegs which slip across the width of the stove.

The Caldera burner is not titanium but it is very light, although not particularly tough.

The burner worked well and I reckon was almost as fuel efficient as the Cone, which I hand’t expected.

The Caldera burner is too wide for either the pocket stove or the smaller Honey configuration.

Next I turned to the Whitebox. This is a brute of a stove, not as fuel efficient as some but it gets your water boiling very quickly.

The Pocket Stove is really too small for the Whitebox. The small format Honey doesn’t look that comfortable either. But in the Honey Stove the Whitebox really comes alive. This is a stove that needs a very good wind shield and this what the Whitebox needs. But it does use a lot of fuel.

Rediscovery of the Triad

Things really got interesting when I turned to the Vargo Triad.

The Triad is aver interesting stove. Its made of titanium and weighs only 24 grams. It has these clever little pot supports which can be used to pour unused fuel back into your fuel bottle. And it is very fuel efficient. I’ve always had the impression that this was the most fuel efficient stove that I had. I’ve not tested this but people have written to Bob having done so and they’ve come up with similar conclusions.

I can remember Bob and I using the Triad on a wild camping trip about seven or eight years ago. There are some basic problems with it. This tiny stove has three feet that are designed to sink into the ground and keep it stable. But in reality I’ve always found that it is too close to the ground and it is far too easy to set fire to dry grass.

The baseplates of both the Honey Stove and the Pocket Stoves are engineered so that the three legs can slip through an then be folded under to make it secure. The height of the stove from the ground is increased considerably.

So, first up I used this in full Honey configuration. It burned effectively and long. In full mode my pots could simply sit on top of the Vargo pot in the way that it was designed.

Next, I attached the Vargo to the  half sized Honey baseplate. This meant that my pro sat on top of the stove and that it was positioned higher above the flame than it would have been when used in native mode as it where. But the stove still burned well and seemed to be efficient.

Next, I tried the Vargo in the Pocket Stove and this worked just as well. This seemed as efficient as the Caldera Cone system but felt far more substantial.

So, I then took out the full Caldera system. The ‘cone’ is quite fragile and made of thin aluminium foil. The cone has to sit inside a plastic holder which also contains a fuel measure and a fuel bottle. The plastic holder is food grade and so can be used for drink or eating, although the latter would get messy.

The Pocket Stove weighs 56 grams and with the box 110 grams. Of course you don’t need the box, you could always stash the flat sections in your pot. A Triad stove weighs 24 grams. Add this lot together and your package is lighter than the Caldera Cone system. It is more solid and robust and performs equally as well. I reckon it will be longer lasting than the Cone. I’ll have to test this out further but I think the Triad will be just as fuel efficient, not least because it is easy to blow the stove out and return unused alcohol to its bottle.

So, a Triad and a Pocket Stove is a very solid and adaptable piece of kit. It can easily be a wood burner as well and I guess would be a better option that the Caldera wood burner/combo stove.

So, what to take on the Challenge?

Well, the Triad-Pocket Stove combo is high on the list. But surprisingly it is the full Honey Stove Monty that is appealing, certainly if the weather forecast is promising.

The full Monty with Triad weighs about 180 grams. Who knows if the weather is good I’ll be using my grill to cook sirloin steak a la Humphrey!

More to follow.