A tent stove design- lightest, smallest, slowest, cleanest, hottest, and simplest

This 400g wood burning tent stove design with a 1,830mm pipe packs into 150mm dia*65mm high bundle for backpacking. It cleanly burns 3.5-7.0g/min of self-feeding sticks. As a bonus, the design allows it also to convert to an outside cooking stove with wood sticks or alcohol.

What makes this tent stove design so different?

A very small efficient stove

This type of tent stove design is like no other. At it’s heart, it has a small and efficient inverted quasi gasifier burner that fits into the top of a small fire dome or heat exchanger/cooktop/tent radiator. The burner spreads its intense combustion heat efficiently into the fire dome. The dome is fitted with a narrow diameter and compact roll up stove pipe that creates a strong stove draft. The fire dome is 150mm in diameter*65mm high ( 5.9*2.6 in). All the stove pipe and parts fit inside the fire dome and weigh ~400g (14.1oz) for backpacking.

Lastly, the stove is designed to efficiently pack into the custom dinner pot that weighs ~100g (3.5 oz) and two more nesting pots (~60g ea- 2.1 oz) can be conveniently added to the kit.

The small efficient fire dome

The fire dome is deliberately small, round, and squat so that it is; light, compact, a backpackworthy shape, good for cooking, and spreads the radiant heat around the tent.

The stainless steel of the fire dome is heat resistant but is a poor heat conductor. This means that it radiates more heat at a higher temperature, rather than conducting the heat away to warm the air.

The small surface area of the fire dome, compared with that of traditional box batch fed tent stoves, means that the temperature is much higher. Importantly, the relative radiant heat emission is very much higher as it is proportional to the degrees K⁴. For example, it means that when increasing the temperature of a stove from 300 to 400C the radiation will nearly double. This critical relationship is discussed in my post on stove temperature and radiant heat.

A tent stove design so simple its assembly is simple

The stovetop on the heat exchanger has only two holes that make it very easy and quick to assemble without the need for any screws or bolts etc.

The burner assembly and stove pipe are fitted through simple holes in the cooktop, rather than through the wall, as for my miniature dome stove. To compensate for the obstruction of the cooktop, a removable pot support V-wire can be attached to safely support the overhang of a large dinner pot. The burner and the flue pipe connector easily remove to leave a flat finish for backpacling

The design balances the burner capacity to the fire dome size so that the fire dome cooktop reaches about 500C for good cooking speed, while the dome wall reaches 300C for comfortable radiant heat for campers.

Tent stove designed to regulate fuel feeding for slow, efficient, clean, and steady combustion.

To my knowledge, all other backpacking tent stove designs employ batch loading (danchel titanium stove and Winnerwell Fastfold Titanium Tent Stove and seekoutside and lightoutdoors and wood stoves a game-changer).

When a self-feeding inverted burner is used as a heat source it eliminates the requirement for a big stove body, as it no longer needs to be large to hold a big batch of fuel. In my design, the fire dome can be small and shaped optimally for the purpose of tent heating, cooking, and packing within a regular cooking pot.

The inverted burners of my stove design, most of the batch of wood sticks is held ‘in waiting’, in and above the fuel stick feed tube (A little like a wood pellet stove).

The entry of the wood into the combustion zone of the stove is self-regulated by the rate of combustion of the fuel at the bottom of the burner. This rate is limited to 3.5-7.0g/minute (0.12-0.25oz/minute, for those over the big ditches).

This means that the wood pyrolysis, charcoal, and wood gas combustion are complete, hot, clean, efficient, and balanced. Normally the stove runs hot and efficiently with no smoke emission. With this design, clean combustion can be achieved with damp and wet wood that often must be used when alpine camping. The absence of smoke keeps the stove pipe clean, light and much easier to roll up when packing up.

In contrast, batch loaded stoves will deposit tar and creosote in the stove pipe under these circumstances. This in turn can lead to run-away stove pipe fires.

This little video of Nick’s stove demonstrates the intense and steady self-regulating burn that the stove achieves with tall damp wood sticks that gradually feeding themselves down to be toasted, dried and then consumed by fire only just when required. The pulsing of the gas flame can be heard better, over the frog calls, in this video.

Vertical burner and fuel stick feed tube

The stove works well with small chunks of fuel if it is freely available. However, the vertical fuel tube is designed to hold a limited cross-sectional area of fuel, normlly sticks, to limit the rate of combustion. Additionally, the stove design allows and even encourages the use of long fuel sticks to increase the quantity of fuel that can be pre-loaded.

These long fuel sticks can be very practical. They are easy to gather, carry, store, and split if neccesay (With a small knife and wood stick mallet.). suitable fuel sticks can be easily broken into suitable ‘loading lengths’ by hand or ‘over the knee’, a fork of a tree, or the use of light secateurs. This design feature allows the minimal fuel preparation to be done within the comfort of a warm tent in bad weather. Using sticks that are split from a solid billet of wood is another very suitable way to quickly prepare fuel with a minimal requirement to carry tools.

Lastly, the unique vertical burner design causes a turbulent flow of air into the charcoal that is a residue of the wood gasification process. The strong airflow causes the charcoal to burn fast and hot. The heat generated from this charcoal contributes to both the drying and pyrolysis of the incoming wood and the clean combustion of the wood gas.

The turbulence also spreads the gas flame heat onto the fire dome walls to improve the radiant heat that the stove provides for the campers. Similar stoves with side fuel/air entry ports perform much poorer in this regard and suffer from charcoal accumulation problems.

A tent stove designed for fiddle-free running

The simplicity of the tent stove design means that once started it just burns ‘flat-out’ to make generous and intense radiant heat. “Just top up the fuel tube with appropriate sticks and the stove does the rest.” This means there is no need for air controls, doors, vents, dampers, and spark arrestors to make up for a less than adequate design.

However, the combustion rate can be downregulated by feeding a higher proportion of thicker/damper fuel sticks to achieve a slower burn rate. “One or two thick and long sticks supplemented with smaller ones makes an excellent lazy fuelling method.”

The burner tube design prevents over-fuelling, even if enthusiastic helpers may try. It eliminates the issue of fuel overloading, smokey combustion, tar and creosote deposition, and runaway stove and pipe temperatures associated with most batch-fed tent stoves.

If the fuel loading is allowed to run down, the stove will hold fire in the charcoal bed for a long time so that full combustion is easily and quickly restored when required.

Tent stove design for strong heat feedback into dry wet fuel sticks

The tent stove design makes it very quick to start, with a little dry fuel or DIY fire starter strips or Lighter Cubes. Then it rapidly reaches operating temperature. In this state, the intense heat feedback from the charcoal combustion in the stick burner can dry incoming damp, wet, and even frozen fuel sticks in preparation for their combustion. This makes the tent stove design very suitable for winter’s wet, cold, and freezing camping conditions.

A tent stove design to make an effective spark arrestor

Other tent stove designs require separate spark arrestors to be placed in the stove pipe. Effective and safe arrestors have a fine mesh filter that clogs up quickly when most needed. This greatly diminishes the stove’s draft and performance unless it is frequently cleaned. On the other hand, coarse filters don’t block up, but they do not stop smaller sparks.

By contrast, the split fire dome, of my stove design, act as an excellent the spark arrestor. The volume of the fire dome and the long flame/gas path slows and delays the sparks so that they burnt out completely to ash that settles harmlessly on the floor of the fire dome. “The fire dome is in effect a giant spark arrestor or spark-box”.

The ash from sparks simply adds a little extra insulation to the stove floor that should already be insulated with a layer of soil or ash to restrict the surface temperature of the stove bottom.

This means that there is no issue of sparks falling from the stove pipe onto; tents made of canvas or synthetic material or any surrounding vegetation to make a fire risk. Daily emptying of any excess ash is easy.

Novel compact roll up tent stove pipe design

To make my design more complete, the stove pipe can be made to fit compactly within the fire dome backpacking bundle. To achieve this, the pipe is a much smaller diameter than others (37mm) and also has novel features such as narrow seam overlap and slim holding rings that store on the rolled up pipe.

Screw up stove pipes designed for quick deployment

These tent stove innovations have also led to improved pipe screwing methods for forming and rolling up of the foil pipe while camping. They are more convenient than traditional methods and importantly avoid crinkle damage to the foil.

With my best methods, the rings can be left in place while screwing the foil out into the pipe form and back into the roll form (1.5 minute). These novel methods are described in a series of posts starting with Part 1- DIY roll up stove pipe improvements. Maybe this little video will reveal the real magic of this 1.5 minute method.

Tent stove designed to mount on found wooden poles

The tent stove design has three small brackets that allows the stove to be mounted on three insulating mounting wires that can be whipped onto bush poles. This can easily hold the stove, cooking pot, and the wood storage rack up above the ground, snow or the floor of a snow pit in a tent and provide space for fuel stick storage and drying.

[Add a photo of the stove mounted in a snow pit]

A transformable three in one stove design- tent stove, outdoor fast cooking blower stove, and an alcohol stove

Yet another, tent stove design feature that distinguishes it from all others is its versatility. It can optionally have a blower port and an extra side fuel stick port cut into it (plus respective covers). By inversion of the tent stove fire dome and removal of the covers, it can transform into a fire bowl for a powerful stick-burning blower stove for outside cooking. “It is only 60% (36 vs 22 seconds/100ml) slower than the benchmark Jetboil flash backpacking stove. This slower speed is still OK considering the fuel is not carried. It is even better when it can cook 2.5L in two ‘ordinary’ low-tech pots at the same time, as shown below. Try doing that with any other tiny backpacking stove!”

The collapsible blower assembly can fit within the tent stove package along with it’s USB power supply. It can provide fast cooking in one or two cooking pots. The same blower stove can also become an alcohol stove by adding a 9g DIY alcohol burner.

Tent stove cooking outside without no tent

The last tent stove design feature affords the fourth mode of cooking that may be required if the USB power for the blower stove is low or runs out. The Tent stove can easily become an ‘unpowered–outside-cooking-stove’ by simply having no tent and providing some support for the stove pipe

My shamefully slow and ’round-about discovery of this is detailed in a post titled; Effect of direct heating on stick stove performance. Most importantly it serves to show the value of the fire dome of my design as both a radiant heat source and an insulator that keeps a high temperature within the dome for hot clean wood gas combustion. “Take too much heat out too soon and the combustion quality suffers!”

Conclusion- stolen tent stove design ideas or innovation?

A search of the online literature will show that my stove design is unique and has evolved over several years from box tent stoves to the current design of my KISS tent stove that has the above novel high-performance features. My design does steal from other inspirational non-backpacking stove designs. With gratitude, these include; Aprovecho publications Designing Improved Wood Burning Heating Stoves, and also J-rocket stoves, and J-rocket mass heaters, and wood pellet fueled rocket mass heaters and a downdraft ceramic lined 44-gallon barrel stove in a ski chalet in my youth (I can find no citation for these now, please let me know if you can).

From all, I have bowerbirded a little to create something new. I have scaled them down, virtually eliminated insulation and thermal mass and made them ultralight and backpackworthy. I think this is innovation.

For more information, on these design issues and the history of stoves, I discuss them in Micro tent stove design for strong radiant heat and robust draft. It also has a description of the Ski Chalet stove based on my recollections. Please see KISS tent stove for the full story of the stove design.

Tim