Survival Stove & Fuel System ~ Boil Water for 4 Months (125 times!!) for 10 Bucks!

Survival Stove & Fuel System ~ Boil Water for 4 Months (125 times!!) for 10 Bucks!

Effective & Lightweight Cooking System using Military Surplus Esbit stove and a small one ounce aluminium cosmetic tin. The cosmetic tin is very fragile and prone to denting and bending but it nests perfectly inside the Esbit stove and is fully protected from even the roughest treatment.

Buyers remorse tip: Do NOT buy an aftermarket Esbit stove unless you hold it in your own hands and feel how sturdy it is. 99.999% of them are garbage and will not support your water filled cookware without collapsing and spraying burning alcohol in every direction. Or at least it’s going to get interesting. Military Surplus German Esbit stoves are fabulous. Of course you can always use Esbit fuel in them!! They are great, stable solid fuel tablets that burn super hot, but they are very expensive as compared to alcohol fuel, especially my recommendation.

I have been toying with camping tricks and hacks all my life. I believe it comes from an honest place of curiosity and trying to make things easier and better for myself and others. Unfortunately for my teachers in elementary, high school and college, they got to experience the joy of my lack of belief and incessant probing first hand. God bless them for not murdering my ass.

The thing that drives me specifically is a real need to understand the root of how something works. Once I understand the rules and principles, I am free to break them at will so long as my understanding stays within those rules.

As an example, you will see a million or more (likely much more) videos on YouTube with people making small alcohol stoves. They range in concept and complexity and there are some real crowd pleasers like the Fancy Feast, Pop can stoves etc. For these stoves you are, again just generally, creating a sealed, double walled stove with drilled holes to create a nice burner effect and wick the alcohol into the tiny jets that have been drilled.

These folks are awesome, fun and entertaining and I have truly enjoyed their content. Once you start truly understanding the core principles of alcohol and alcohol stoves, you can begin to formulate your own ideas and applications.

Let’s talk about the principles, laws and rules surrounding alcohol as a fuel and explore that first.

Once you understand alcohol as a heating fuel for cooking or boiling water, a lot of things come into focus. The very first principle or law of igniting alcohol is that it only burns on the surface. While it is miraculously flammable, it is in no way explosive. Therefore the alcohol cannot, by its very nature, be consumed in a ball of flame like, say, gasoline, which is explosive due in part to the vapours being highly flammable and explosive.

All the scenes you’ve ever seen in movies of the hero tossing a zippo into a gasoline filled scene, are simply instructional videos on how to blow your ass sky high should you ever attempt this level of coolness. Unless, of course, a stiff breeze is blowing the gasoline vapours away from you, but then your lighter would likely snuff out while you tossed it and then you would die trying to retrieve your zippo and never get a chance for take two. Moohaha.

Now that the nature of how alcohol burns is understood, we can break the rules of common thinking that we need a complex alcohol stove with a double walled chamber that wicks the alcohol up and into tiny jets. All you need is a small open container, pour in your alcohol and light it. It will burn on the surface until the alcohol is consumed.

The next principle to understand is that you simply need a decent distance from the flame that is produced, to the bottom of your cooking vessel. You will need one to two ounces of alcohol to bring a reasonable amount of water to a boil. Something like a half a litre to a litre or about the same for a half or full quart is close enough. If your water is hot, you’re good to go.

Let’s chat about alcohol fuels for a moment. Most through hikers hiking the Appalachian Trail and such are usually going to go for something like Yellow Heet, which is essentially gas line antifreeze. There are MANY types of fuels like this and everyone wants a piece of your wallet on this one. Skip all the BS and go to your local hardware store and pick up a 4 litre jug of Methyl Hydrate. It burns 100% clean, leaves no residue on your cookware and is basically what they like to colour blue and sell as fondue fuel at 4X the price.

While we’re talking about fuels and methyl hydrate in particular, you should know that methyl hydrate is a slippery little weasel and will find a way out of nearly any container not designed to hold it. I have a heavy duty military surplus 8oz bottle specifically designed to trap this particular genie in the bottle. No leaks ever.

Other things you can use for fuel are alcohol gels which are not nearly so Houdiniesqe in their will to be free like pure, liquid alcohol. By the way, skip even the purest of rubbing alcohols unless you absolutely can’t stop yourself from loving black smoke and cleaning black soot off the bottom of your cookware. I’m going to experiment a bit with hand sanitizer gel as well and see how clean it burns just to spice up my life a little.

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Have a great day,
Bug