The simple tiny tent stove is designed to provide warmth and cooking within a small winter tent while backpacking and camping.
“The stove is the product of years of experimenting, learning, fun, blundering and obsession. It has resulted in a truly simple, hot, sweet, compact, light, fiddle-free, efficient tiny tent stove. It can burn damp bush sticks, without complexity and it has no residual vices to be managed.”
Background. This post is an abstract of a longer post that was about the background and development of this simple tiny tent stove.
Design origins. The simple tiny tent stove is a simplified derivative of a family of more complex dome stoves that all use an inverted stainless steel bowl as fire dome to burn bush sticks for heat. Many stoves in this family have double fuel ports, one in the sidewall and the other on top. These holes (and others), can make more of the fire dome available for cooking and allow the fire dome to also function as blower stove and as an alcohol backup stove.
Stove design. The simple stove in this post has these additional features stripped away so that it leaves only two holes in the fire dome top. One hole is to fit a 40mm dia roll up flue pipe. The other 40mm dia hole is to fit the fuel/air/burner tube.
When a fuel/air tube is inserted into the fuel port it becomes a powerful and clean-burning inverted J-burner. This burner is somewhat similar to the popular and efficient burners in J-style rocket stove burners.
Sketch from permacultureprinciples.
I resist using the same term for my burner, as mine is not strictly a rocket stove and this can raise the ire of ‘rocket stove zealots’. The above feed tube is the equivalent of my fuel stick/air tube. The fire dome in my stove forms the equivalent to the ‘burn tunnel’ in the above rocket stove but it forms a proportionately longer path than the tunnel does.
However, my stove does not have a heavily insulated heat riser to complete the combustion and develop the stove draft, as all rocket stove should. Instead, it has a tall roll up flue pipe for creating strong stove draft.
My unique burner is a ‘quasi gasifier’ according to Anderson & Reed. This means that it makes wood gas and burns it without separating the combustion process from the gas pyrolysis process.
This simple tiny tent stove becomes a powerful and efficient radiant heater and cooking device for a small tent. It can do this powerful heating cleanly and efficiently with a handful of damp bush sticks.
The J-burner in the simple tiny tent stove dries the fuel sticks as they slowly self-feed down the fuel tube. It causes very hot and clean combustion of bush fuel sticks (~400g/h).
The vigorous air entry causes the flames and hot gases to mix turbulently and burn strongly to heat a large portion of the fire dome and create a strong flue pipe draft to sustain the hot combustion.
This is a brief Instagram video of a dome stove showing off, just doing-its-thing. Looking down the J-burner tube steam and smoke can be seen issuing from damp stick ends as they dry and are heated in readiness to join the inferno.
Cooking. Small pots can be used directly on the cooktop.
A titanium extension V-wire can be attached to the fire dome by small welded brackets. The wire can safely support large dinner pots when required.
Stove ground mounting. The simple tiny tent stove can be mounted directly on the ground, rocks or some other heat resistant support.
Above snow (or soil) stove mounting. When camping on deep snow or soil the three small welded brackets on the fire dome can be used to support the stove. Raised mounting of the stove on bush pole legs makes a nice height for good warmth distribution and cooking. It also provides room for a wood storage/ drying rack below the stove.
Conclusion. This tiny round tent stove can fit in a 1L dinner pot as backpacking friendly load. The simplicity of this stove means that unlike most other tent stoves, it needs no fiddly; assembly, air controls, dampers, heat robbers or spark arrestors.
This simple tiny tent stove behaves like a gas stove by using a simple and unique inverted J-burner that is a quasi gasifier. “It only has one setting…..flat-out red-hot. However, it only burns about 400g of sticks/h.”
It naturally, self feeds bush fuel sticks, dries them and makes wood gas and charcoal from them. Then it effortlessly self regulates the combustion of the gas and residual charcoal to provide even, stable and intense heat that is distributed over most of the fire dome for comfort and cooking.
Here is a little Instagram video of the simple stove startup.
Tim
