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Re: Esbit stoves

Hi.

I used mostly Esbit this year. (with 60ml of meths)I found it was lighter than using meths or gas.

I used a MYOG Cone with a modified Starlyte stove (My stove has the base of a drinks can glued to it. Inverted it makes a good esbit burning dish.

One thing I find is that Esbit can be hard to light. I overcome this by putting a tiny drop of meths on a tab - then one quick spark and it's away.
(I used less than 10ml over the 2 weeks for lighting the Esbit.- 2 to 4 times each day)

Re: Esbit stoves

Top tip Mole.
I had a bugger of a job lighting some Esbit the other week.
Mind you it was gusting to 20 in the valley.
The Meths lit 1st time.
I shall take a wee bottle with some meths.

Re: Esbit stoves

Hi Mark,

Like Mole I also used an alcohol/ Esbit combination this year (mainly Esbit) and I agree with pretty much everything that’s already been said so far in this thread. I’m not entirely convinced though that Esbit is significantly lighter than alcohol overall – I think it may depend on your system and precise needs.

In most conditions a full 14g tab seems a little more than I need to boil 570ml or so of water using my Caldera cone and Evernew 630ml tall pot. However, rather to my surprise, I found that 3/4 of a tab or 3 x 4g tabs won’t reliably produce a rolling boil.

On the other hand I spent some time recently trying to build an alcohol stove which would be optimal for my particular system and fuel – I use bioethanol rather than meths. I now use about 18ml of fuel to boil my 570ml which, with alcohol being only 80% of the density of water, weighs almost exactly the same as the large Esbit tab.

If your pot is larger than mine and you want to boil a bit more water then you might make better use of the full 14g tab than I do. Otherwise, you may find there’s little to choose between alcohol and Esbit on weight alone.