Bushcraft Fire Lighting: Woodburning Stoves

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Video Transcription

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 we've also got a wood gas stove or wood gasification stove 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 so we'll fire them up and see how they perform just get an idea of how they work and what their pros and cons are so when you buy the stove it will come in a small nylon bag and it'll piece together a bit like this you'll have the top as a pot stands built into it you take that piece off you're left with the inner of the stove we'll talk about the workings of it in a minute if you piece it together it's pretty simple I found that through using it these parts here get a bit stiff you just need to squeeze them in a bit like a spring get them to pop back 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 vial goes to taenia 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 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 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 just copy some green hazel and I'm surrounded by conifer as you can probably see around me lots of larch all over the place as a result there's loads of needles all over the ground really thick beds of needles Gran's really spongy and soft with them um 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 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 your 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 woods 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 stave is 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 already dry and dead and small to begin with and then while the stoves heating up and getting going I introduce other woods in that process so this is large 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 specs on the bark and small little lichen and fungi and that you can tell immediately if they're dad or not just by moving them you can see it just pops straight out from the root a lot of the time they snap as well when you bright when you bend them and obviously if wood 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 all 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 new shape so that's definitely alive this one here looks pretty alive as well but this one here just broke off immediately as you quite a lot of other little pieces

the great thing about Hazel's 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 so just fall on that top of the tree there and you've got a nice bunch of twigs there were lots of resin in it which is a plus which is why working with conifers quite good just to put in your stove and get it going so I'm just going to prepare some birch and I've got plenty of fuel to burn this will be my ignition to get the thing going it's a pretty rubbish part but it might be enough you want to make sure the lids off the wood gas stove at the start is you want to build a fire in the core before the lid goes on just get that fired up few pine cones for luck I'm just going to begin packing this full of wood burn it down and just keep going with it so now this is burnt down quite a bit you can see there's larger pieces of hazel sort of starting to smolder away I'm going to pop the lid on eventually the Jets should start to kick up around the edge on the underside of the stove there you can see those Jets 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 stoves been burning for about five minutes and I've had to refuel it and in the refueling process it'll produce plumes of smoke obviously because the wood is gradually getting burnt and heated up obviously whether the woods damp or dry will affect that process and if you're in dry conditions very easy stuff 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 hissing signs you know it's kind of priming up there and the smoke will die off and the Jets around the top of the stave will begin to fire out of 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 on 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 superheated 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 rebuilt 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 while bit of carbon monoxide carbon dioxide and you've also got a you know char which would cha basically about sort of 30 to 50 percent wood chart 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 byproducts and re burning them to give you a much cleaner burn and as you can see now the processes have been completed the fuels being used efficiently

I have no smoke I have jets just firing out nice clean in a nice clean burn out the top of that to heat my tea up so if you find your staves 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 takes a very long time for the wood to be burnt it's because the ash bed at the bottom has just become full of ash and it's not taking an 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 it opens up the Airways for the slave a bit obviously make sure you don't have a pot on top when you do this this is going to go everywhere and it should start to crackle a bit more produce a lot more smoke you know a lot more oxygen suddenly now being sucked in and it should get going soon enough so when you get a firebox stove it will coming a little nylon slip with a Velcro lid that you just slide this unit out of and it will pretty much be folded up like this that's the nice thing about firebox stove is it's very very compact very robust we'll talk a bit more about that in a second but if I unfold this you'll see it comes apart like that then the inner sort of ember pan at the base and if I can spot it there it is fold side just like that then the whole unit can sit quite happily these prongs can go through and these are what you support your like GSI my GaN for example and just sit inside and you can adjust the height of them and you get this as an ash bed as well just fit 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 though I might go get a bit more large just to initially get it going 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 you initially get it going a bit like the wood gas stove you just want to take any kind of pot supports off the top these two prongs here I'm just going to get a bit of birch do the same thing get a big bunch of lunch put it straight in the top just like that start to die down we'll burn down I should say

so one of the main advantages of these sort of stoves that fold away in a box shape 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 fire box they've 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 1 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 sits flat against your back the base you generally don't notice the weight and it's not that heavy if you're somewhere we're not allowed to make a fire directly on the ground the stove really does help it helps you utilize natural fuels as well instead of having to carry around additional fuel with you which is 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 given thing there but it's a very very good stove and I like the way you can put quite kind of large chunks of wood in you know with the wood gas stove you're limited to quite a small internal container to hold your initial fuel so you can tend to run out very quickly and it'll burn through it very quickly and if you put big pieces in 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 will burn for ages like it has been doing now for about 10 20 minutes 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 videos helped that having a look at these two stoves as I say there are a lot of different designs like that 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 you know because it can be about 40 pounds which it can be quite a bit of money depending on the kind of yeast you get out of it but they are well-made and they do work really efficiently lots of pigeons flying around and 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 by making some substitute energy out of a particular bracket funghi 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 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 in a not really designed to be run like that it's designed just to lie to cook some food and you know boil some water but it took two loads for me to boil this cup of water here so really that's too much for me it doesn't pack away enough but it might suit somebody's not leaving to look really a footprint tight 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 you know they don't want to leave any marks where they are 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 a very large piece of wood and I've quite a good bed of embers going in the bottom like a half now and run it for a long time and it doesn't take a lot of attention you know you can go for quite a long time before I have to put more fuel in it depending on what process I'm in how large the sticks are in the stage that I'm loading it up and so there are some advantages and disadvantages to both of them there are a lot of staves 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 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 videos helped out you can have a look at these items in a bit more detail on my website at www.kppc.org/keeps

and just comment or ask me any questions you want and I'll get back to you as soon as I can thanks again