What is a camping turbo stove?

Recently, in the wake of interest in lightweight hiking gear, new items of kit have started appearing among hikers. Among them are camping turbo stoves - highly efficient devices with which you can cook food on just a few branches. They require a minimum amount of firewood, and can easily cope even with damp twigs. What kind of camping turbo stoves are these? Let's take a closer look at them.

Statement of the problem.

Of course, a campfire is a source of food, warmth and joy. But its effectiveness is extremely low. In order to heat a couple of liters of water in a pot simply suspended over a fire, you usually have to burn a decent armful of firewood (which must first be collected). To avoid starting a fire in the forest, the fire pit must be prepared first (line it with stones and cut a depression in the turf). To hang the pot, you need to build a structure from branches or stones, or carry a pot stand or a steel cable with you. It turns out that a supposedly “free” fire actually requires a significant investment of time and effort. Usually tourists classify these chores as pleasant and enjoy the process... or buy themselves a burner. But is firewood really so hopeless? Is it possible to make working with it more comfortable and efficient?

Turbo stove idea.

Folding camping stoves have been known for a long time (although they are widely used, perhaps, only on harsh ski trips). They solve two of the three previously stated problems - they work as a stand for a pot and eliminate the need for a fire pit.

How to increase the efficiency of wood burning has also long been no secret. To do this, you need to supply additional oxygen to the combustion chamber - create good draft, connect forge bellows, or sit a volunteer with a “sit pad” in his hands by the fire. And if the stove is small, then turbo-blowing can be provided by a tiny fan with a battery-powered electric motor. This is how the turbo stove was invented. In it, due to more complete combustion of wood and gases released during combustion, efficiency has significantly increased and the need for fuel has decreased. True, there was some dependence on batteries, but they say they last for a long time (1-2 weeks).

Now, knowing that there will be no firewood at the campsite (for example, you are climbing into the highlands), it is quite possible to tie several branches to your backpack and walk calmly. Two kilograms of firewood will be more than enough to prepare dinner and breakfast for a couple of people.

The principle of operation of a turbo stove

Look at the illustration above of how a turbo stove works. As you can see, it is assumed that the turbo stove should burn not so much wood as wood gas. Under the influence of high temperature, this gas is released by the firewood itself (the process of pyrolysis is in progress). Wood gas mixes with fan-driven air and burns violently at the top of the camp stove.

That is, theoretically, we should see tongues of a special “gas” flame coming out of the upper nozzles of the wood burner. However, in practice, I rarely noticed such obvious combustion of wood gas. And the multilayer stacking of firewood and its gradual burning indicated in the diagram has little correlation with the actual size of the stove and the fuel used. Typically, the branches stand vertically in the combustion chamber and burn all at once, from top to bottom, and burn out very quickly, on average in 3 minutes.

Oddly enough, all these discrepancies between practice and theory do not in the least prevent turbo stoves from performing their tasks well.

Advantages of a camping turbo stove.

• much lower firewood use while camping
• ease of ignition
• tolerance to wet firewood
• fast boil
• replaces the pot stand
• lower fire risk than a campfire
• less soot on cookware
• easy to set up a windscreen

DIY turbo stove

If you wish, you can make a turbo stove with your own hands. Most often, tin cans (easy to work, but they burn through quickly) or stainless steel tourist mugs (on the contrary, durable but hard to work) are used as a building material for the manufacture of turbo stoves. To construct one turbo stove you will need at least 3 mugs of different sizes, an angle grinder, metal shears, good steel wire and a small electric motor (for example from a DVD player or computer cooler) with a propeller and a battery pack. Metal working skills won't hurt either. To understand the design and figure out how to make such a thing yourself, watch our video review of the Airwood camping turbo stove. This is the most common, classic design, and implemented at a good level.

Actually, I’m hinting that after experimenting with your own DIY builds, you can go and buy a better-made turbo stove on the Internet. There are even factory samples like Biolite Stove. The latter, however, is too heavy (since it contains an electricity generation unit) and therefore less versatile than simple battery-powered stoves.