Bushcraft Fire Lighting: Woodburning Stoves

Hi there guys, I thought it'd be good to do a video today covering stoves and specifically wood burning stoves. I've got two stoves here in front of me. I've got a firebox stove and I've also got a wood gas stove or a wood gasification stove and they're two quite popular stoves really or popular designs that you see reflected in different forms and different models and I thought maybe if somebody was out there looking for stoves this video might help them out. So I thought it'd be good to cover them today, sort of fire them up and see how they perform and just get an idea of how they work and what their pros and cons are. So when you buy the stove it'll come in a small nylon bag and it'll piece together a bit like this. You'll have the top as a pot stand built into it and you take that piece off you're left with the inner of the stove and we'll talk about the workings of it in a minute but if you piece it together it's pretty simple. I've found that through using it these parts here get a bit stiff and you just need to squeeze them in a bit like a spring get them to pop out and then you have a pot stand which functions a little bit like that and then you can place your pots on top. So if you've got a cup like this, this is a Vargo titanium mug I use as a pot and it sits on the inner of the pot stand and if I push that down you can see it's pretty robust and it's not going to go anywhere. I mean the fact that it's on a log obviously means it's slightly less stable than it would be on the ground but you can see it's pretty pretty good. If we get a frying pan that sits on the outer as opposed to the inner again now it's pretty robust can cook quite well on this. So now you've had a brief look at it we'll get it fired up and see what it can do and talk a bit more about the mechanics of how the stove operates. I've just copied some green hazel and I'm surrounded by conifer as you can probably see around me lots of larch all over the place and as a result there's loads of needles all over the ground really thick beds of needles grounds really spongy and soft with them. So what I'm sort of doing is basically creating a raft to go beneath the stove of green wood which will just help the oxygen feed up into the stove a lot better and stop it clogging up on the ground with lots of ash and it will stop it from burning the pine needles beneath me as well which I really don't want to happen. It's a lot like when you build a raft on a wet day to keep fire off the ground or even on a dry day just because it helps get oxygen into the fire a lot easier this will do the same but it just keeps it off all those pine needles. So the kind of wood you put in your stove is going to directly affect the performance of the stove you know if you're loading up with really dense woods all the time and you're not spending time processing those woods into little chips the stove's going to be really slow and just produce loads of smoke and not be very efficient and it'll be frustrating and you'll be getting it going for ages you don't really want to do that. I tend to look for woods that are already dry and dead and small to begin with and then while the stove's heating up and getting going I introduce other woods in that process. So this is larch and it's one of the few conifers that isn't an evergreen as it's been winding down for the winter you can see all this all these branches that have been falling down from the top of the tree really dry full of resin and this stuff will burn like petrol if you introduce a bit of birch to it so that's really what I'm going to do to start with. So there's a lot of hazel in this woodland and hazel's a really good wood to use as well simply because it's very good for producing dead standing wood even in the heaviest of weathers what you want to do is look for the branches have specks on the bark and small little lichen and fungi and you can tell immediately if they're dead or not just by moving them you can see they just pop straight out from the root a lot of the time they snap as well when you bend them and obviously if wood's snapping like that it's not going to be green so just being mindful of this tree above me it looks pretty secure at the moment but I won't spend too long here or move too much that might make it move or that isn't very big but you can see here this piece of wood is very flexible you can see it bend almost completely into a u-shape so that's definitely alive this one here looks pretty alive as well but this one here just broke off immediately as do quite a lot of other little pieces so the great thing about hazel is even if it was tipping it down with rain you can always find really small twigs a bit like beach twigs if there were beach in this woodland that you can gather together and make a large bundle with to take back to your camp so again just plenty of large twigs just sitting up in this tree lots of it very very dry it's all just fallen out the top of the tree there and you've got a nice bunch of twigs there with lots of resin in it which is a plus which is why working with conifer is quite good just to put in your stove and get it going so I'm just going to prepare some birch now I've got plenty of fuel to burn and this will be my ignition to get the thing going it's a pretty rubbish pile but it might be enough you want to make sure the lid's off the wood gas stove at the start because you want to build a fire in the core before the lid goes on just get that fired up a few pine cones for luck I'm just going to begin packing this full of wood and burn it down and just keep going with it so now this is burnt down quite a bit you can see those larger pieces of hazel sort of starting to smolder away I'm going to pop the lid on and eventually the jets should start to kick up around the edge on the underside of the stove there you can see those jets and we'll talk a bit about how that actually works so those jets are really going now get some water in there so you can see this stove's been burning for about five minutes and I've had to refuel it and in the refueling process it will produce plumes of smoke obviously because the wood is gradually getting burnt and heated up obviously whether the wood's damp or dry will affect that process and if you're in dry conditions very easy stove to maintain but in wet conditions it can be a little bit tricky depending on the materials you have available to you you can see as it begins to charge up it starts to make a hissing sound so you know it's kind of priming up there and the smoke will die off and the jets around the top of the stove will begin to fire out a flame and the process will start to kick in and that's really what the stove is designed to do that's that's the wood gasification process kicking in there but talking a bit about what the wood gasification stove is doing if you imagine the stove is like a flask it has two layers so it's got an outer layer and an inner layer and the inner layer is where I made that initial fire I had the birch bark in there I put the larch in there and I started building it up and burning it down building a fire in the core of the stove and that was heating up the entire stove basically and getting a fire going for me and the outer layer has holes all around the bottom air intakes where air gets sucked in through the base of the stove through that second baffle passing up the chamber and getting super heated by the fire in the stove then it gets fired out the jets at the top and it mixes in with the wood gas from the fire and then basically gets re-burnt and creates those jets and gets heated and starts burning and also wood gas gets taken in through the base and into those jets as well and and the whole process makes for a very clean efficient burn because obviously when you make a fire it's a pretty messy process you know you've got lots of smoke being produced lots of hydrogen carbon monoxide well a bit of carbon monoxide carbon dioxide and you've also got you know char wood char basically about sort of 30 to 50 percent wood char going up through that smoke and it makes for a very messy process so what the wood gas stove is doing is it's taking all those by-products and re-burning them to give you a much cleaner burn and as you can see now the process has been completed the fuel's being used efficiently i have no smoke and i have jets just firing out nice clean you know a nice clean burn out the top there to heat my tea up so if you find your stove's not not working quite as efficiently as it did in the first place and you've been running it for a long time doing a lot of cooking you just find every time you refuel the stove it takes a very long time for the wood to be burnt it's because the ash bed at the has just become full of ash and it's not taking in oxygen properly so a good thing to do is just put a stick in the base and just rattle the stove a bit and it just shakes all the ash down out of the ash bed and opens up the airways for the stove a bit obviously make sure you don't have a pot on top when you do this or else it's going to go everywhere and it should start to crackle a bit produce a lot more smoke you know that a lot more oxygen's suddenly now being sucked in and it should get going soon enough so when you get a firebox stove it'll come in a little nylon slip with a velcro lid that you just slide this unit out of and it'll pretty much be folded up like this and that's the nice thing about the firebox stove is it's very very compact very robust and we'll talk a bit more about that in a second but if i unfold this you'll see it comes apart like that and then the the inner sort of ember pan at the base if i can spot it there it is folds out just like that and then the whole unit can sit quite happily and these prongs can go through and these are what you support your like gsi mug on for example and just sit inside and you can adjust the height of them and you get this as an ash bed as well it just fits in so i've got a cup of tea now fortunately but we're going to get this stove fired up i've obviously got plenty of fuel although i might go get a bit more larch just to initially get it going and we'll have a look at how it performs and talk a bit about the pros and cons so when you're using this stove to initially get it going a bit like the wood gas stove you just want to take any kind of pot support off the top and these two prongs here i'm just going to get a bit of birch and do the same thing get a big bunch of larch put it straight in the top just like that it'll start to die down or burn down i should say so one of the main advantages of these sort of stoves that fold away and that are box shaped is they tend to pack away a lot better and you can fold them away and slip them down the back of your pack and you generally don't notice they're there the firebox stove's got a little bit of weight to it as i say it's quite a heavy stove but it's very robust it's a one mil of stainless steel so you know it's a very very robust design but if you slip it down the back of your pack so it's flat against your back the base you generally don't notice the weight and it's not that heavy if you're somewhere away you're not allowed to make a fire directly on the ground the stove really does help and it helps you utilize natural fuels as well instead of having to carry around additional fuel with you which has never really made too much sense to me but then it depends where you are and obviously if i'm in woods like this you know using wood is obviously the the given thing there but it's a very very good stove and i i like the way you can put quite kind of large chunks of wood in you know with the uh the wood gas stove you're limited to quite a small internal container to hold your initial fuel so um you can tend to run out very quickly and it'll burn through it very quickly and if you put big pieces in it takes a long time to charge up unless they're really dry and full of resin but with this stove here once you've got a very good bed of embers going you can put the big stuff on top and it'll burn for ages like it has been doing now for about 10-20 minutes and it's a good stove one thing i like about the stoves it's really easy to put fuel in it's got a hatch on one side and on the other side it's completely open it's really useful so i hope this video has helped out having a look at these two stoves as i say there are a lot of different designs out there there's a number of different types of wood gas stove where you can make your own out of some cans quite effectively there's some good tutorials online um you know because it can be about 40 pounds which you know can be quite a bit of money depending on the kind of use you get out of it but they are well made and they do work really efficiently lots of pigeons flying around um i mean the only disadvantage for me really is that you can't load it up too much and you you have to tend to it quite a lot i did a video not too long ago about making some substitute amadou out of a particular bracket fungi and i chose the wood gas stove and i had quite a lot of work that day running that stove for about three to four hours constantly topping it up and creating wood for it that will burn easily on a wet day so it took a lot of management and that's a long time to run a stove you know they're not really designed to be run like that it's designed just to allow you to cook some food and um you know or boil some water but it took two loads for me to boil this cup of water here um so really that's too much for me it doesn't pack away enough but it might suit somebody who's not leaving to look really a footprint out there if they're in an area where you know they want to sort of have minimal impact and depending on what fuels are available to them and uh you know they don't want to leave any marks where they are or produce little smoke and just have a small stove going using natural resources but for me i much prefer this stove here the firebox because i can put large sticks in it and very large pieces of wood and have quite a good bed of embers going in the bottom like i have now and run it for a long time and it doesn't take a lot of attention you know it can go for quite a long time before i have to put more fuel in it depending on what process i'm in of how large the sticks are in the stage that i'm loading it up at so there are some advantages and disadvantages to both of them there are a lot of stoves out there like i say i mean there's a honey stove which is another one which is a really popular one sort of pieces together and uh it's very lightweight very efficient stove a bit like the firebox in its design so it's worth having a look around and looking at some of the reviews out there but i hope this video has helped out you can have a look at these items in a bit more detail on my website at www.mcqbushcraft.co.uk forward slash wp where i usually put all my videos on there now with a write-up about them just because it allows me to put links and things on there and photos and a bit more text and information on the subject as opposed to just the video itself on youtube so thanks for watching again guys and i hope the videos helped out and just comment or ask me any questions you want and i'll get back to you as soon as i can thanks again