The Survival Stove
While most of these posts focus on cooking, I think, to a large extent, that misses the point. From reading the website, the primary focus of this thing is to provide emergency heat (and lots of it), with cooking as an associated benefit. This isn’t something I’d take on a paddle down the Wisconsin River, or to the Sylvania or BWCA, but as a piece of gear to keep you warm after a disaster, or a take the chill off a remote primitive cabin in the winter, it looks great. It is a specialized piece of equipment. A primary cooking device? No. A furnace you could cook on in an emergency? You betcha.
survival doesn’t mean
camping in a state park, nor backpacking, nor leave-no-trace. It means living off of what you have when that doesn’t include running water, piped gas or line power. It quite legitimately assumes canned goods, batteries and plenty of organic combustibles. This stove does not require cut wood: it will burn smashed furniture, wads of paper or dried cat shit. Electric motors are incredibly rugged and reliable. Batteries are in every house by the handful. You don’t light this from the top, you light kindling and drop it in. Nothing could be simpler, least of all building a campfire of twigs on your kitchen counter after a tornado cuts off your heat and floods your cellar, or a rockslide cripples your car. You don’t get it because you aren’t imagining it where it was designed to be used.
I pack my
Zip in my back pack. You need to wait till it cools and clean it up a little (dump out the ash) to put it away but it packs very nicely.