Backpack Rocket Stove Great For BOB / BOL

We love the idea of a small rocket stove for our bugout bags, bugout location and our get-home bags so much, we have several of them.

In our opinion, there’s no better way to cook food and boil water for the weight & space they take up. 

Along with this article, we recorded a podcast about the stove and other items we use at The Place and in our vehicles:

Let’s look at a new backpacking sized rocket stove we just picked up as an example

We purchased a new small rocket stove on Amazon, the Canway Camping Stove, to leave at The Place to have another cooking option. (Note: as always, we have no affiliation whatever with the company, and the link above is not an affiliate link. We paid for our stove with our own cash money and the company doesn’t even know we exist.) 

What makes this style of stove different than many others? It burns any small scraps you happen to have around you… basically, if it’s dry enough to burn and small enough to fit into the combustion chamber, this stove will burn it and cook your food or boil your water for you. 

Rocket stoves use a “dual burn”, drawing air from the bottom for the “first” combustion. The burning materials produce flammable gas (methane), and the stove draws in more air for a “second” combustion. Here’s a chart by Canway of how it works:

Does it work in real life? Check out the picture below.

The manufacturer claims: 

• Compact & Lightweight: Lightweight and easily collapsible,package collapsible size is 5.5″x5.5″x 3.38″, compact design makes outdoor stove easy to be packed in a small storage bag leaves more room in your backpack.
• Sturdy Camping Stove: Made of high-quality stainless steel.This backpacking stove with 3 arms pot support base provides safe and stable cooking platform and distributes heat evenly. The style 2 is also suitable for 1-2 people use, but it is higher then style 1, so that it is easily get the firewood added without picking up the pot or pan.
• Environmentally Friendly: With no fuel canisters or alcohol needed, we’ll be leaving no chemical emissions behind. The camp stove use branches, leaves, woods as fuel which is easy to get anywhere.
• High Thermal Efficiency: The secondary combustion keeps camping wood stove burning continued for 20mins with dry firewood and wood chips.

(Don’t blame Salty and Spice for the grammar; that’s from the manufacturer.)

Do these claims hold water? Rocket Stove setup:

We put the stove to the test using a set of pots that we also recently purchased from Amazon 

Size and weight: Very nice. The smaller bag below is the rocket stove; it breaks down into multiple nesting pieces to reduce its footprint. While the pots take up more volume, they are designed to be fillable before being put in the bag. When I backpack with them, I’ll be pre-mixing foods that will only require rehydration/brief cooking in ziplock bags and storing them inside the pots.

While having so many pieces for the stove sounds kind of fussy, it was cake once I saw how it was supposed to be put together. The ring with vents in the bottom is the bottom piece; it needs to sit on something non-flammable as hot ash and embers will drop from the piece above.

The thing that looks like a bucket with holes in the bottom holds the combustibles inside the ring on the left side of the picture and both get set on the base. The vents on this middle piece are the rocket part of the rocket stove; they let in air drawn from below to more efficiently burn the fuel.

The piece on the right is upside down; the three arms that hold the pot are folded inside for better storage.

Here’s how the rocket stove looks put together with the arms rotated out for pot holding. Those teeth are nice; they reduce the tendency of the pot to slide.

Rocket stove use:

The equipment stays clean for about two seconds; it will never be soot free again. No problem, it’s easy to wipe off the surface soot so it doesn’t make a mess. 

In this picture you can see how the top ring of the rocket stove has a gap so you can conveniently add more fuel during cooking. This is valuable. Heating things and boiling water are very fast, but the little bits of fuel burn even faster. That stick was about the biggest piece I used. I was burning mostly the boxes the MRE entrees come in. Better to burn them than pack them out!

The first job, boiling water, took less than ten minutes from ‘start adding fuel to rocket stove’ to ‘pour boiling water into tea mug’. “Rocket” indeed. Four minutes to heat an MRE entree to perfection in the rocket stove.

Yeah, one use blackened the pot completely and melted the cover of the handles right where it meets the pot when a flame from the rocket stove licked up that high. The nonstick interior of the pot cleaned right up though.

Here’s the rocket combustion chamber, post meal. Just a little ash to dispose of.

Now, on to the pots we were using

We also picked up an inexpensive pot set, the Wuudi Outdoor Camping Pots And Pans Set because it looked like a nice, inexpensive match for the Canway stove.

At $12 including shipping, I wasn’t expecting much but we were impressed by the quality of the little pots when they arrived.

Here’s some of their blurb, edited to reduce the silly level of “adglow” the manufacturer uses to describe their product:

• You will get one Aluminum alloy pot,one Aluminum alloy bowls. It is perfect size for 1 youth scout or adult hiker backpacker.
• Easy to clean with the included loofah cleaning sponge. The entire set weighs 224g.
• For the outdoor activities who hikes, camps, you know that you need camping cookware. This set is perfect because of its small, compact size and incredible value. You are sure to love this camping cooking set. Both the pot and pan have folding handles for space saving and compactness.
• When the cook set is fitted together (with the lid on the pot) for travel and storage, it contain room to carry a stove, matches, seasoning, salt, pepper, a sponge and many other things to keep your overall space consumption to a minimum.

Since Spice did the cooking with the set, let’s see if the manufacturer’s claims hold water

The put together pot set is a great place to store ziplocks of prepared foods. Mice wouldn’t be getting in there, so long as the pots were in the bag which holds them face to face.

The handles fold out for use. Good news: The heat insulation worked fine even with the pot taken right off the fire. The bad news: Flames from the rocket stove melted that insulation right near the pot. There was still plenty left for good use.

The pot has volume markings on the inside, good for use with backpacking meals that need a predetermined volume of water. The cup size is about right for a cup of tea or coffee.

They cleaned up perfectly easily after use.

All in all, two thumbs up for both stove and pans. They add very little extra weight and bulk (since you can store food inside the pans) and have the dual function of allowing hot food and purifying water, using very small quantities of burnables.

The stove is sized to accommodate camp fuel tins, but I can’t imagine bothering when sticks and trash burns so conveniently. Seriously, I used about ten finger-sized sticks and two MRE entree boxes to boil water, then heat an MRE, then heat more water for cleanup.