Relax-A-Fire Firestarters Lightweight, Quick, and Safe

I am not sure that we are your target audience, Gretchen, but I appreciate your offering a 10% discount. I happen to be a pyro guy whenever I can on my backpacking trips, and I have probably built and maintained (safely) more fires than my local Boulder County, Colorado fire districts have put out over the past 40 years.

My technique is to use a one inch piece of a Strike-a-Fire stick to get my kindling going. This works out to $0.12 and 4.67 grams per fire. A petroleum jelly/cotton ball wrapped in a piece of wax paper would be about the same cost/weight. In dry conditions, I can usually get a fire started simply by using very tiny twigs and a Bic lighter.

I don't see how your product can possibly compete with these methods. I am thinking that you should target the rich Marin County, CA chiminea owners, or other folks that don't care much about weight or cost. This is just one man's opinion, and certainly no offense is intended here.

Thanks for dropping by. I wish you the best.

"Find them online at http://www.relaxafire.com and use code "BackpackingLight" to receive 10% off your order. Don't leave home without them!"

Sounds great for the backyard barbecue or a fireplace during the winter, but I doubt you're likely to find many takers here for backpacking use. This is, after all, Backpacking "LIGHT".

Yup. Too heavy compared to birch bark, et al.

I might buy some just for the "Western Cedar Aroma". Nothing like the smell of burnt cedar after a raging wildfire.

Gretchen, what's the diameter of each disc? If cut into quarters, would each quarter burn for 30 minutes? What kind of 'soot' does it leave on the bottom of a pan? Does it burn completely, or does it leave residue behind?

Thanks.

Monte,

whatabout summer strength wild sage sun-warmed post thundershower??
:)
i also like burnt sandalwood…

Yep, a sandalwood campfire, with some bits of frankincense and myrrh tossed in. Great for those Arabian nights in the Empty Quarter.

Since I can't afford those, I go with pinon pine from New Mexico–sweet smell and no sparks.

The diameter is 3.75" and they are scored into fourths so you can break them into quarters for more uses. They reach 1200*F within 2 minutes. The stand-alone fire would have a visible flame for about 15 minutes (depending on the conditions), but combustion goes on for about 30 minutes. You can use the quarters to start a wood fire as well for a clean flame with very little smoke. It will leave a very light amount of soot on the bottom of pans, but is nontoxic. If you'd like, I would be happy to send you some free samples to try out, and I would greatly appreciate to hear your feedback! If you are interested, you can email your name and ship to address to gretchen@relaxafire.com and put "BackpackingLight free samples" in the subject field. Thanks!

Gretchen Reynolds

I would be happy to send the first ten people some free samples of the product to try out and get feedback on. I am a current sophomore at the University of Washington and would greatly appreciate any help/advice/pictures. I value your opinions and would also be interested in any other outlets you think I could reach out to. If you are interested, please email me at gretchen@relaxafire.com with your name, ship to address, and please put "BackpackingLight free samples" in the subject field. I will post on here once I have received the first ten. I look forward you your reviews and feedback after trying the product.

Some other key features:
-reach 1200*F within 2 minutes
-3.75" diameter
-scored so that they can be broken into fourths
-no need for kindling or dry wood

Gretchen Reynolds

I'm in. You can contact me via PM. Best regards – Jon

Here is a clickable LINK

Sent e-mail

Thank You.

Sent email. I hope I get a sample they look interesting. :)

Hi everyone!

All 10 of the free samples have been redeemed, however I am considering offering another set of 10 based on the results/feedback from this first set. I will keep everyone posted! Also, you can buy them online at http://www.relaxafire.com and use code "BackpackingLight" to receive 10% off your order.

Gretchen

Got my sample today. Thanks Gretchen.
80.5 grams for a disc that looks like a hamburger patty. 3.75 inches across and nearly 7/8 inch thick.
Kinda crumbly out of the package, so don't open it over your carpeting. You can't break pieces off of cleanly. Disintegrates into a pile of sawdust with some bigger bits. Here are some photos.

Here is the whole disc and the pile of crumbles next to my old standard, the PJ cotton ball. I could not ignite the Relax-A-Fire with my steel.

This shows the ignited crumbles and what happens when you break off a piece.

Here is a lighted pile of crumbles about the same size as a cotton ball. I could blow both out if puffing hard.

Here's what is left after the pj ball(left) and the Relax-A-Fire burned out. Nearly full combustion with the ball and still some unburnt dust with the Relax-A-Fire.

All in all a fine product for car camping or lighting a fire at home. I prefer the ease of handling of the PJ ball for it's ability to be transported in one piece and ease of use. Also a source of petroleum jelly giving it dual use status so important to us here at BPL. I did smell some cedar through the black smoke of the paraffin. No worse smoke wise than the balls. Beeswax would be preferred. But at least these are made from recycled ingredients.

Thanks again to Gretchen for sending me a sample. I hope she finds my results and comments useful. I do not think these should be marketed to backpackers. Would be great for campground fires where kindling is short on supply at times. Best of luck with your product.

I'm looking forward to what others have to say.

Ken,

Kudos to you for taking the time to work up a quick review and to offer positive feedback to the seller.

I agree with you…neat product, but the ultralight/lightweight backpacking demographic might be the wrong target market for this product.

After all, we are "crazy" and are always looking for the lightest alternative.

Hard to beat the cotton ball with petroleum jelly.

Still….appreciate that the vendor reached out to the community to get feedback.

Hope it is constructive and helpful to her.

Always great to see new products and options on the market.

Tony

I’m impressed with flame size of a 1/4 size piece of the disc. It burned hot for at least 20 min. Plenty of time to get a nice fire going. Lights easily with my mini Bic.

The light score lines makes easy work of breaking into 1/4’s

While it was burning all I could smell was paraffin. It gave off the characteristic black smoke of paraffin.

A one ounce piece makes a good fire starter.

More testing will follow.

After reading your post last night, Ken, I went to the mail box and there they were. Thanks very much, Gretchen. So I took one to my chiminea, popped a micro-brew, and did a burn of a full disk. There was no breeze at all, and ambient was 47* F. The actual weight is a bit lower than 4.0 oz. Mine averaged 3.73 oz. The disk was easily lit with a Bic, and the flames spread quickly over the entire disk. Here's a photo of the disk getting uniformly warmed up:

After about 4-5 minutes we had a full bloom of the flame, which was about 9-10" above the top of the disk. Pretty impressive, I thought.

The flame continued at a respectable height for 27 minutes, when it began to die down. At 30 minutes, there was still a bit of flame, enough to be able to add some kindling and get a real fire started. Gretchen was kind to provide me with some extra disks, and if I have 4 extras after I've done some other tests, I would like to place 3 of them in a close triangle, and place a 4th on top. It would be fun to see what that does, as far as fire size and length of burn.

OK, so this morning I compared the fire starting abilities of a pj/cotton/wax paper, a 1" piece of my preferred Strike-a-Fire sticks, and an equivalent weight of some Relax-a-Fire "dust" wrapped with wax paper. All samples were 4.5 grams, for an accurate comparison. There was a barely-perceptible breeze, and ambient was 50* F.

Front left: Relax-a-Fire
Right: Strike-a-Fire
Back: PJC

The Strike-a-Fire was the easiest to light with a Bic, while the other two took an extra effort to get the wax paper to burn.

The Strike-a-fire had the most robust flame, which lasted 5 minutes. Its flame-out was at 7:30 minutes.

The PJC was reasonably robust (once it got going) for a full 9 minutes, with flame-out at 11:30 minutes.

The Relax-a-Fire never really produced a robust flame compared with the other two, but it was OK for 5 minutes. Its flame-out was at 7:30 minutes.

So it appears that the petroleum jelly/cotton is the clear winner as far as length of burn time. I will probably continue to use the Strike-a-Fire, due to the convenience of carry (no mess, ever), and also because I don't need the extra burn time to get my fires going. The Relax-a-Fire dust wasn't very impressive, but I will try it again with a carefully cut 4.5 gram block of it and see how that works. (Edit: a few days later I cut a small 4.5 gm. piece from a bigger block, wrapped it in wax paper to keep everything contained, and I lit it up. The size of the flame, the time it lasted, and the flame out was identical to that of the dust).

My next test will be to see if a 25 gram block of the Relax-a-Fire will boil 2 cups of tap water. If it does, I will then see what a 17 gram block will do. That's the weight of both alcohol (.75 fl. oz. of SLX) and also Ready Fuel gel that it takes me to boil 2 cups.

Then there's the business of seeing if 4.5 grams of Light My Fire Maya Dust will compete with these as a fire starter. I've never actually tried that.

More to come…

Gary, don't you think that those fire starters will burn better if you rebuild your firepot with titanium wire?

–B.G.–

That's a well rusted cast iron chiminea, Bobby G. It's 12 years old, been through ~250 raging patio fires, and I've replaced the grate 3 times due to the intense heat of burning pinon. The fire department has called on me three times, the asthmatic neighbor complains often, and my wild cottontails sometimes come over to snag some heat during frigid winter nights. Lots of sentimental nostalgia associated with this baby.

But maybe if you would kindly send me some 1/2" titanium plate and 20-30 feet of 3/4 " OD ti tubing I could give it a try?

"But maybe if you would kindly send me some 1/2" titanium plate and 20-30 feet of 3/4 " OD ti tubing I could give it a try?"

I know of only one titanium vendor in the Boulder area.

–B.G.–

There are NO titanium vendors near Boulder, only one ti geek that I know of. But you could try SeekOutside.com in Grand Junction, or even Josh Leavitt's dad of TitaniumGoat.com in Ogden, UT. Either one should be able to set you up with that fine titanium wood stove that you want to PIF to me.

Yesterday I tested the Relax-a-Fire to see if could be used to boil 2 cups of water. For the first test I placed a 23.5 gram chunk of fuel in a QiWiz Firefly wood stove. I figured that the stove would serve as a wind screen, and also contain the fire. I used a MYOG pot and lid made from a big steel can of beef stew or something, as I hate to get a sooty mess on my good stuff.

There was a good flame for the first 10 minutes as shown in the photo, but after that the flame rapidly died down to where it didn't actually reach the pot bottom. The water initially became rather hot, but nowhere near boiling. When the flame died down the water stopped heating. Flame-out was 16:00 minutes. The distance from the base of the fuel chunk and the bottom of the pot was 4.0 inches, which I think is too great.

I then used a setup that placed the base of the fuel 2.0" from the pot bottom. I cut a piece of fuel that weighed 17 grams, to compare the results with the same weight I use with SLX alcohol and also Ready Fuel gel. I used one of my 2" tall pot supports and a titanium foil windscreen. The windscreen was made with a slot for pot handles, which was not necessary for this pot with a bail. The handle slot allowed the flame to dance rather wildly, and it would have been more efficient if it wasn't there.

The 17 gram piece of Relax-a-Fire fuel burned with a flame that contacted the pot bottom until it went out at 16:15 minutes. At the 10:00 minute mark the water achieved what I would call shrimp eyes, little bubbles at the bottom of the pot. The shrimp eyes remained throughout the rest of the burn, but a true boil didn't quite happen. I think that if a more conductive aluminum pot had been used, rather than the steel one, a boil would have been accomplished.

The disadvantage of boiling water via wood/paraffin is, of course, the amount of soot buildup on the pot. The worst was at the bottom of the pot, which took a couple of minutes with an S.O.S. pad to remove completely. The deposits on the sides of the pot came off easily. A couple of years ago, when I did some tests of the Firefly stove with small pieces of maple and oak, the soot deposits on the side of the pot were much harder to completely remove. I wonder if the paraffin in the Relax-a-Fire somehow made this soot easier to remove.

Oh, another thing (unrelated to the boil tests)–I tested the performance of 4.5 grams of Light My Fire Maya Dust, to see how it would do as a fire starter, compared to the other 3 in the previous post. That amount of Maya Dust took up the space of a golf ball, which surprised me. I didn't wrap it in wax paper, rather I just filled up the recessed bottom of a Foster's can (which had been cut and converted into a large Esbit tab holder). It was a miserable failure as a fire starter when done this way. The top layer of the Maya Dust would burn OK, but its ash smothered what was below it. I needed to continually stir the dust to keep it burning, and there was never a noble flame (maybe old Maya Dust?). Georgia fatwood is a nice way to start a fire, but not so much when used the way I did here.

I would like to offer 15 more samples to the first 15 to email me at gretchen@relaxafire.com with your name and ship to address! This time, I am targeting those of you who plan on camping this Memorial Day Weekend and intend to have a campfire or use a charcoal BBQ. I would love feedback on how it preforms as a firestarter for starting wood or charcoal. Thanks!

My scout troop used two halves this weekend to start two different campfires. The first was easy but the second took work because the wood we had was somewhat damp. Might not have gotten the second one started without the disk. This is a good product for car campers but living in California, I'm not likely to use it backpacking because of fire restrictions.

Thanks for the sample.