Best superlight/small canister stove?

im leaning toward getting a snowpeak litemax for my small stove that i can carry for solo trips...anybody have thoughts about really small canister stoves? good experiences? bad ones? thanks!

I have a MSR pocket rocket, and have no complaints.

Hands down Soto OD-1R, it's small and it's light but the big thing is the fuel is pressure regulated.

what are your cooking requirements? what kind of weather?

I have a Snowpeak Litemax, used it on the JMT last year and it worked great. It is less stable than a jetboil but also way lighter. It worked great for boiling water for coffee and rehydrating meals, and actually did a pretty good job of simmering as well.

I love my little ultra light and super small canister stove. Bar none the best way to hit the back country. Keep the canister warm and it will last longer, and learn all those little tricks about how to conserve fuel and you will save big on weight.

Hey Parker,

Hope all is well.

+1 on the Snowpeak Litemax. I didn't have any issues with it tipping, but I used a narrow-based pot and rocks/dirt to level it out.

-Michelle

I use a monatauk gnat. To the best of my knowledge it the smallest and lightest butane stove available. ~1.6oz. It works great.

monatauk.com/inc/sdetail/509

Just built a zen alcohol stove...it is pretty light. Its an empty 3 oz potted meat can.

msr reactor, for longer trips with freeze dried meals it's incredibly lightweight. a single canister will last a full week.

Look up DIY alcohol based stoves, penny stoves, etc. They dont do well in wind unless you really shield them, but work well in most temps and altitudes, are way lighter than your canister stove, and less waste. I think my entire camp kitchen including stove, lid, pot, 2 days of fuel, spork, lighter, weighs in at a little over 10 oz. now look at the weight of a single small canister of fuel, and you will see that even when empty it weighs more than my stove and pot alone. alcohol stoves are not for everyone, but if it works for you it will save money and weight to build a DIY one.

+1 on the soto stove

I used pop can (penny) stoves for a long time before I bought the soto. The penny stoves are super light and super cheap but they take a bit more work than a canister stove to use. It's a matter of preference I guess but I like being able to get dinner ready as fast as possible after a long day.

Alcohol stoves are good. You need to work on the right combination of stove/pot to make it as efficient as possible, otherwise you will be wasting fuel and not saving as much weight as you could be. Some alcohol stoves will lick flames up the sides of your pot (wasting fuel) if you have a stove that burns too fast or your pot isn't big enough for the stove.

I use a 700ml titanium cup and built a alcohol stove modeled after minibulldesign's elite redbull can stove. It's a double walled stove and boils ~16 oz on a half ounce of denatured alcohol. So that one works for me.

Alcohol stoves take a bit more patience and trial and error when starting off, but you can end up saving a good bit of weight with the right combination.

--Edit - I ran another test so I changed the figures above. I boiled that inside at 65F.

+1 for alcohol stoves. I have a cat and a supercat. I mostly use the supercat because it will boil enough water for my wife and I to have dinner and tea on 1-1/2 oz of fuel and just one burn.

My stove takes about 7 minutes to boil enough water for two dinners. That is about 2.5 minutes longer than a jet boil. But who cares? My DIY stove takes less than a minute to set up and start cooking.

If the OP is looking for a wall stove, then canisters are superior. Though, I do have an idea on how to make a hanging alcohol stove.

Depends on what you want to use it for.

The Snowpeak Giga ultralight, combined with an Ortik HeatIt is a nice combination for warm weather climbing and open bivis.

link:

larsonweb.com/stoves/id7.html

For backpacking, the best ultralight stove I've ever used is a Trail Designs Ti-Tri Caldera cone.

link:

larsonweb.com/stoves/id3.html

For melting snow, nothing works better than an MSR Reactor.

larsonweb.com/stoves/id5.html

Should I say it again?

Cartridge stoves without a pressure regulator are like.....

Seriously! That' a BIG reason the Reactor works so well. OD1R!

I went through a phase of building alcohol stoves. The standard 12oz can stove is relatively easy to make (second or third try usually yields a solid stove for first-timers).

Eventually, I came up with my own template for the smaller cans they are selling soda in which I use for any lightweight backpacking adventures.





I enjoy the process of building them and using them. Not to mention they are about as cheap as things can get. Marine stove fuel is disturbingly cheap. When doing backpacking trips that extend over multiple days in beautiful wilderness, the silence and simplicity of an alcohol stove comes into its own.

That being said, if you aren't doing cooking exclusively for yourself and in somewhat acceptable conditions, I recommend leaving the alcohol stove behind. I use a pocket rocket for more demanding adventures, and an MSR reactor for mountainous snowy adventures. If the wind is blowing at 50+mph, your clothes are soaked from getting pelted by some ambiguous mix of sleet and snow, and you are semi-spooned with your mate at high camp in a tent that seemed way bigger at sea level, you honestly want nothing to do with the alcohol stove.

For lightweight backpacking the alcohol stove is my solution. I use the MSR titan kettle on top and my kit includes the stove, a small amount of denatured alcohol, a spork, a homemade windshield, and a piece of felt that saves my fingers from getting burned while taking handling the pot.

My two cents: Soto 1 hands down, for what you're asking for. Much stronger than the pocket rocket, and sustains a stronger flame as the can gets lower.

Good luck!

I rock an esbit stove on solo trips. I've got a setup that weighs in under 2.6oz total for stove, pot, spoon, windscreen, lighter etc.

MSR has the Micro rocket now.. 2.6oz. not as small as the Gnat but close.

Pretty sure Alcohol doesn't do as well in the cold.

Gram weenie alcohol stove is a pretty good non homemade version though.

weight/fuel variables definitely depend on what you're doing.

adventuresinstoving.blogspo…

this guy does tons of stove testing.

DIY soda can stoves have served me well... if you don’t mind some work, you can mess with the design a good bit, (i made 16 prototypes) and come up with something more efficient than you’d expect.  Double-walled stoves are unnecessary, as you can make a single walled stove with a closed top and prime it and have equal, if not better, performance than double walled. You save weight too, mine weighs a quarter of an ounce