Lighten Your Backpacking Stove Setup With These Ultralight Hacks - Backpacker

Testing differently-sized ultralight titanium pots Photo: Nathan Pipenberg

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If you’re comparing backpacking stoves, there’s one metric that every brand seems to advertise: boiling time. It makes sense: It’s easy to test, and easy for customers to understand. Plus, under ideal circumstances, even cheap ultralight stoves can boil a pot of water in under four minutes—a marketing boon for any brand.

But when you’re backpacking, do boil times really matter all that much? After a year full of ultralight stove testing, I can safely say: not all that much. Instead, I’ve set my sights on a different metric—efficiency. When I’m making a meal in the backcountry, I’m not too concerned about waiting a few extra minutes for my water to heat up. I’d much rather have a stove system that weighs less and saves fuel so I can lower my pack weight and make fewer trips to the store to buy new gas canisters.

After a yearlong deep dive into stove testing, here’s my best advice for an ultralight stove system that works well and saves fuel.

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Across numerous tests, wind proved to be the biggest threat to fuel efficiency for most lightweight stoves. A stove that performed well in perfectly calm conditions, like the original MSR PocketRocket, could require nearly three times as much fuel when exposed to a steady 5-mph wind. This affects not just fuel efficiency, but boiling times, too. In one test with 6-7 mph wind, the recently-reviewed BRS 3000T burned through nearly 25 grams of fuel before it could boil 2 cups of water. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s almost a quarter of a 4 oz fuel canister.

There are two simple ways to prevent wind from wreaking havoc on your stove system. One is to block the wind. The simplest way to do this is to use natural barriers, like logs or trees. This can be effective, but doesn’t always work perfectly in the field. Another is using a windscreen, as is common with wood and alcohol stoves. But canisters and windscreens aren’t a great mix: A tight-fitting screen could cause the canister to heat up and explode. If you have a remote canister stove, there’s no issue using a windscreen around the stove. There are also a few floating windscreens (like this one for the BRS stove) that leave the canister exposed.

But there’s also a far simpler solution: A modern, wind-resistant stove like the MSR PocketRocket Deluxe or Soto Windmaster. There’s no great secret to these, they simply have a metal “cup” around the burner head that serves as a built-in mini windscreen. And they are seriously effective. In my testing with the Windmaster, a steady 5-mph wind had almost no effect on the stove’s efficiency. In both calm and windy conditions, the Windmaster burned about 6-7 grams of fuel (6% of a 4 oz fuel canister) per 2-cup boil.

Turning down the heat is the second biggest efficiency gain out there. Think about it like driving on the freeway. If you’re going 80 mph, you’ll get there faster and guzzle more gas in the process. Slow down to 65, and the trip will take longer, but you’ll use less fuel.

The same is true for a backpacking stove. Across all the stoves I tested, running a low flame resulted in fuel savings of about 33 percent compared to running them wide open even though the low flame took two or three minutes longer to reach a boil on average.

What is a low flame? That’s a bit subjective. Go too low, and you won’t get past a simmer. In my experience, the lowest setting that still allows the flame to fan out across the bottom of your pot is perfect. Without the pot in place, that’s about a 3- or 4-inch flame height.

If you’re boiling water to purify it, the Environmental Protection Agency recommends bringing water to a rolling boil for at least one minute. But if you’re making instant coffee or rehydrating a meal with purified water, there’s little reason to wait around for a full boil.

If you bring your water to a gentle simmer instead, you can save about 2 grams of fuel per use. Again, it’s not a huge difference, but it’s enough to add up.

If you’re chasing every bit of fuel savings you can find, these final two tips are for you. In my testing, I used a variety of titanium pots with diameters ranging from under 3 inches to over 5 inches. The wider the pot is, the less fuel it takes to bring the water to a boil. At the extremes, this could be as much as a 33 percent difference in fuel use when comparing something like the titanium bottle from Grayl (diameter: 2.75 inches) to a Snow Peak Cook & Save pan (diameter: 6 inches).

But it’s also worth remembering that we’re concerned with overall weight too. Any fuel savings you get with a slightly wider pot (which ends up being only fractions of a gram per use) will be offset by the added weight of the pot itself. A pot that’s about as wide as it is tall, like the Toaks 550, will weigh the least.

This might seem like the most common sense advice on this list, so it might be surprising that testing revealed that using a lid was a pretty marginal difference, measured in fractions of a gram of fuel saved. Note that the wider the pot is, the more of a difference having a lid makes, because there’s more surface area exposed to the air and heat loss. But lids also weigh very little (under an ounce, usually) so why not bring it along? Unless you’re worried about losing it, using a lid seems like an easy choice. It’ll save you a bit of fuel in the long run, and keep dirt, leaves, and critters out of your water while you cook.

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