Wood Gas Stove

[Devonian]

I’ve been looking at these wood gas stoves:

http://wildstoves.co.uk/wood-cooking-sto...gas-stove/

And when I saw someone selling them for £20 on ebay, I decided to get one. Its purely as a back-up as I already have a decent compact gas stove and plenty of gas cylinders, but these wood gas stoves are compact, efficient and do not need a store of fuel to be maintained.

As well as the wood Gas Stove, I also bought a 14cm Zebra ‘lunchbox’ billy can into which the stove packs away perfectly as can be seen in the following photo’s:











So having only taken delivery of the stove this week, I decided to give it a trial. First of all, lighting the stove just using a couple of matches and wood shaving was a doddle compared with trying to light a fire on the ground, the stove itself acts as a wind shield and there is clear air flow from below to help fuel the fire. Once lit, and adding fuel, the fire quickly took hold and was ready for cooking within a couple of minutes!!





I then used placed the billy on the stove with 1 pint of water in it to see how long it would take to boil.



The only issue I had at first was that the wood was burning too quickly, but that was my fault as I was only using wood shavings and thin branches, as soon as I placed larger sections of wood in the stove it was fine and kept burning without the need for additional fuel.

Once the stove was going, you could clearly see the effects of the wood gas providing a secondary burn from the high level ring of internal ventilation holes, this really helped to provide a much stronger heat.

It took about 6-7 minutes to boil a pint of water, but that included messing around adding fuel and taking photo’s. Also it was quite windy as you can see from the flames, so I reckon with the right grade of fuel, in a sheltered location, you could easily boil a pint of water in under 5 minutes.



Once the fuel had all burnt out, there was also very little ash left.



Overall I found this to be an excellent and very efficient stove, which is easy to carry and can be used with a variety of fuels.

The YouTube reviews/demonstrations on the above link are also good to view.

This is the actual one that I bought, though there are others at a similar price on ebay:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/151361025381?r...26_rdc%3D1

I already had the Zebra having picked one up cheap at a recent land rover show, but this is the same one and I find these better than the normal Zebra billy cans as they do not have that dread plastic clip, these are all 100% stainless steel:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zebra-152314-Sta...zebra+14cm