staehpj1

I always wanted one to work out and tried a few home brew ones. They never worked out for me. I saw a few factory made ones other guys had in camp and they seemed to have the same issues with them being fiddly, sooting up everything if not super careful how you packed and handled the pots, and so on. Then there were stove/fire ban issues where stoves were required to have a shutoff. Times/places where even gathering twigs was forbidden and so on.

I would love to find one I liked well enough that I'd put up with those at least for some types of trips, but so far have not. I think that the ones I have used were fiddly enough and required frequent enough feeding that they didn't tempt me.

FWIW, their biggest advantage to me would be the lack of need to carry fuel which would come into play if there were long stretches without resupply. For bike touring that typically isn't the case since I can typically resupple almost daily if need be and can buy fuel pretty much whenever I need it. I use yellow bottle Heet so I typically can get it in any town, if not there is something else in any big box, paint, or hardware store. For me it isn't usually an issue for backpacking either since I tend to plan trips around fairly frequent resupply points with caches or mail drops or whatever is necessary to avoid too many days of provisions on my back at a time. Where it might be more useful to me is canoe camping, but there I don't usually mind carring a bit of extra weight in liquid fuel. So I have mostly given up on wood burning stoves, but still kind of keep an eye out for one that might solve the issues that annoyed me.