Contact:

Choosing a Backpacking Stove

There is a huge market for backpacking, expedition and camping stoves these days, resulting in the availability of many products targeted at different consumers. You can find many stove options suitable of various purposes, fuels, and pocketbooks. These stoves range from classic designs modeled after ones our grandparents used to newer stoves genre incorporating cutting edge space age vaporization technology and special materials to make them lighter, perform better or just look more modern. Each stove design has its own special features (e.g. white gas stoves work at subfreezing temperatures, butane stoves are as easy to use as a home gas range, alcohol stoves burn clean, hexamine stoves and fuel are ultra-light, wood stoves don't require packing in fuel, water activated cookers are relatively safe to use and solar stoves are pollution free). And each stove design has its unique drawbacks (e.g. petrol stoves use caustic fuel, gas stoves must use prefilled canisters, alcohol stoves have a poor heat to fuel weight ratio, hexamine gets very expensive, wood blackens pots, water activated cookers are heavy, solar stoves are generally extremely slow to cook with). This can make stove selection exciting and potentially a difficult endeavor since no one stove has it all, making stove selection an exercise in compromise rather than a hunt for the ultimate stove.

Faced with all of the stove choices out there these days, you may need to do a little research to narrow down which stove, or stoves, will best suit your particular needs. Some of the factors to consider when selecting a backpacking stove include:

Some backpackers may even find that they need to plan for different types of cooking systems for separate treks or multiple platforms on extended treks, should the main/preferred fuel type not be available on a leg of their journey. Visit our Stove Systems Page for more on the system concept, as you will need more than just a stove to cook.

See more here:
Zen Backpacking Stoves - How to Choose a Stove