BPL Esbit Titanium Wing Stove Review

Overview

This little stove weighs in at under 13g - that's right less than half an ounce. It's designed to use solid-fuel tabs. Stateside these are sold in Blister packs. In the UK Gelert sell fuel tabs that at under £3/24 will work or you can buy a normal 'picnic' stove as used by the army and cut the fuel tablets into quarters - This is not a big stove!!!

When folded away it slips easily inside a cup. In one cup you can fit everything you need for several days of heating water.

Indoor Testing

Solid Fuel stoves are a little like the unwanted kid at the party. In fuel efficiency terms they are as good as the best Alcohol stoves for fuel consumption and faster than almost everything but gas for boil times.

The only real downside with them is that fuel can be hard to find on the trail and can leave soot on the base of cookware.

Esbit can be difficult to light but if you use a match or a small piece of cotton wool as kindling that will take care of it. Esbit (or Hexamine) burns as a vapour rather than as a solid and so the initial heat is required to get some of the material to vaporize and burn so that the rest of it will burn.

Under ideal conditions half of a Gelert tab would boil a cup of water in under 3 minutes. The total weight of fuel consumed was just 3g. That puts it on a par with gas for bangs-per-buck. It also matches the calorific values of each fuel.

Outdoor Testing

Without a windshield the fuel consumption was two tablets for a cup of water - roughly 12g of fuel. That puts it on a par with alcohol stoves. It requires a windshield like this 11g windshield

it does create the smallest and lightest cookset that you can carry - everything you need for several days will fit into a titanium cup. To go lighter would require building a camp fire.

Lighting Esbit can be tricky and this can become wearing after a while.

Early Conclusions

It's lined up to be my favourite stove for summer use. The weight savings over gas or alcohol are just too big to ignore. In the winter, I just want to boil the water as fast as possible regardless of the weather...

The only tweak that I might do is to use a 1g titanium tent peg to stabilise it plus 2-3 for the windshield.

Realistic weights for a cooking system

The stove may weigh only 13g but what do you actually need to carry in order to boil water?

At a touch over 100g for that first cup of water it compares very well with the MSR Pocket Rocket which started out at 358g for a full cylinder. The MSR Pocket Rocket will boil slightly faster but then it takes more time to assemble....