56g Esbit or 68g Alcohol Heiny Stove on the cheap….and pls. check my fuel tablet calculations for multi-day

From reading other's research…

-I'm using a 4g rice cakes bag to hold Coghlan or Weber tablets/cubes, as they don't come prepackaged and I can keep the sooty heiny pot in there as well to keep things clean.

-Esbit 14g unwrapped, 14.6 w/ packaging, one cube will boil two cups.

-Coghlan's 7g unwrapped, one tablet will boil 1 cup.

-Weber cube 11g unpackaged, one cube will boil 2 cups.

-With any fuel tablets, will need some way to keep soot away from rest of pack and keep tablets from drying out too quickly once unpackaged (Esbit are indiv. packaged so does not apply)

With those assumptions…

3-day trip, 2 hot dinners, 1 cup boiled…weight in grams.

Coghlans
Fuel Weight………….. 14
Fuel Holder Weight 4
Sum Weight………….. 18

Weber
Fuel Weight………….. 11
Fuel Holder Weight 4
Sum Weight………….. 15

Esbit
Fuel Weight………….. 14
Fuel Holder Weight 0.6
Sum Weight………….. 14.6

Alcohol
Fuel Weight………….. 26
Fuel Holder Weight 10
Sum Weight………….. 36

4-day trip, 3 hot dinners, 1 cup boiled…weight in grams.

Couglans
Fuel Weight………….. 21
Fuel Holder Weight 4
Sum Weight………….. 25

Weber (rounding up to nearest tab)
Fuel Weight………….. 22
Fuel Holder Weight 4
Sum Weight………….. 26

Esbit (rounding up to nearest tab)
Fuel Weight………….. 28
Fuel Holder Weight 2.4
Sum Weight………….. 30.4

Alcohol
Fuel Weight………….. 39
Fuel Holder Weight 10
Sum Weight………….. 49

Esbit rocks in some situations, and sucks in others. It's good to stay flexible and use whats best for your situations.

Esbit has many pluses:
One of the lightest fuel source you can carry.
It doesn't leak.
As far as I know, the best way to go on shorter hikes.

Other fuels may be better in other situations.

I bought a 24 pack of Webers today because it was cheap and local at HD. I plan to open one up, light it a bit and let it sit in the rice cakes bag w/ a knot in it for a week and see if it will keep.

With this stove, boiled 1 1/4 cups of water. 1st boil in my kitchen in ~7:30.

Blew out the cube, cooled down the Heiny, put in cold tap water again and reached a boil in about 9 minutes.

Still had 1/3rd of the cube left. The cubes are slower to a boil than my alcohol I think, but definitely better with the weight of fuel/boil. Tons of soot.

I left the remainder of the cube in the rice cakes bag with the stove and tied a knot in it. Going to wait a week to see if it dries out significantly.

You can't just snip the cubes out of the 24 pack all sealed and then expect them to last forever….each cube is joined to the next in the blister pack with a little canal on top. So when you snip the backing plastic and associated foil it is exposed because that canal is now open.