Titanium stoves for hot tents

[Matt W]

I recently started looking for a 4 season tent so that i can extend my backpack season into our beautiful Wisconsin winters.  I then came across hot tents…this looks right up my alley!!  From my research thus far, it looks like the Luxe brand tents would be a good entry level unit with a stove jack…just wish the location of the stove jack was away from the door or more in the middle.

The question now is what stove do you all suggest?  I like the looks of the Luxe one for breakdown and pack size, but the price tag not so much.  Seek Outdoor appears to be out of my league, G-Stove looks to be backordered forever (90+ days).  Is there anything else out there that ya’ll suggest?

[Franco Darioli]

Looks to me that if you want a foldable Ti stove , around $400 is the starting point.

Cylinder stoves are less expensive but not that good or no good at all for cookong/melting snow.

[Michael Sirofchuck]

My friend, PG, is the master of all tent stove camping and I’ve done many trips with him.  His stove of choice is the TiGoat titanium box stove.  He cooks on it and it keeps us toasty warm and dry.  You will get what you pay for.  We’ve used it silnylon and DCF mids with excellent results.

[Matt W]

Looks like TiGoat is maybe out of business or no longer making these stoves??

[Michael Sirofchuck]

I believe the owner of TiGoat passed away; there was some talk of the business resuming, but it doesn’t look like it.

[Philip Tschersich]

Apparently Ruta Locura (started by the Ti Goat owner’s son) can custom make the Ti Goat stoves. I have some friends that love their TG WiFi stoves so much (I have one and I happen to agree) that they are asking the RL dude to bang a few out.

The new Seek Outside U-Turn looks pretty good. It sort of splits the difference between the older SO box stoves and the TG Wifi.

But then all of these appear to be outside your price range…

[Franco Darioli]

I was going to suggest the Wi Fi because it looks to me that it is a lot faster and easier to be assembled than a square stove ,as the cylinder type generally are , but still has a flat top to cook on.

(BTW , Josh , the designer, had confirmed that to me when he first made that stove. He has made all three types)

So could be a good idea to see if Josh can make some more.

[email protected]

[John W Clever]

Hey Matt,

I live in Oregon and have extended my outdoor season into the winter months with a hot tent as well. I have found it to be extremely enjoyable. Now, rest assured there is nothing lightweight about the way I do it. I’ve been refining my winter kit for years now and have it pretty dialed in for my current needs. I like to haul into a location and base camp there for multiple days with daily snowshoe outings. In my opinion and experience, the best winter hot tent camping stove is the Four Dog Ti stove (https://fourdog.com/ultra-light-i-dx/#reviews). It costs a pretty penny but will last a lifetime.

I would also recommend looking at wintertrekking.com for the best information available on this type of camping and, just like Backpacking Light, for helpful forums and a community of individuals willing to answer questions of people looking to enter into this fourth season of outdoor experience.

The fire box can raise the tent temperature into the 70 degree range when its in the single digits outside

My evening perch

The exterior after a powdering of snow and under a Super Moon

[David Thomas]

*** THREAD DRIFT WARNING ***

This post inspired me (and by “inspired me”, I mean “distracted me from my to-do list”) to crash around the inter web and look at backpacking wood stoves.  And I saw that BioLite has tweaked their USB-charging / fan-assisted wood stove.  They now have a battery built into the electronics module which seems like it would really help in charging higher-amperage devices.  I found with the older version that I needed to keep it constantly very full of very dry, very high-surface-area chunks of very nice firewood (like sawn up chunks of old furniture).  Otherwise the amps would drop below what my iPhone would accept and I had to constantly reset it.

Anyway, back to the topic of tent heating: Could you support a flue pipe on a BioLite stove and then up through a roof jack?  Kind of like a chem lab hood or kitchen range hood is above the heat source, although just an inch or two above – enough to drop in more sticks and pine cones.  The draft hood adaptor from the top of a gas water heater or furnace to 3″ or 4″ flue pipe would be about ideal for that.

The price ($129.95) of a BIoLite seems to have come down and is less than a titanium stove.  It wouldn’t be as good at heating a tent as the larger firebox of the Ti Goat and others, but it takes up less floor space, the fan gives a more complete burn, and it’s also a battery, flashlight, and USB charger.

A down side of the BioLite so configured is that you couldn’t cook with it inside your tent.  OTOH, if you use the BioLite outside the tent without a flue pipe, it really screams as a stove and you’d have your hot water (and a sooty pot) really quickly.

[David Thomas]

And, because we weren’t all Boy Scouts 40 years ago:

If you coat the bottom of your pot with liquid soap (or a palmful of 2:1 water+soap) and let it dry before using over a campfire, the soot washes right off.  You can even do that at home.  Alternately, just dedicate one pot to get sooty and one stuff sack to hold that sooty pot for the duration of the trip.

[John W Clever]

I love the creative thinking. I still consider myself a newbie in this type of camping. I have taken to creating a cache of wood, covering it with a tarp during the fall at winter campsites I expect to be using once the snow starts to fall. But even with dry wood and a stove specifically designed for this purpose (and which I can button up), I have found myself almost smoked out of my tent multiple times depending on the chimney draw, outside wind and quality of wood. So, I might even be more concerned with that outcome with a BioLite stove. And additional thought would be that on these cold winter evenings one wants to go as long as possible without fiddling with the fire but enjoying heat output. The time spent not fiddling can be spent pouring and enjoying a pint, reading, cooking, etc. If I were to make suggestions for this type of camping and keeping it as light as possible, I’d go with a nylon tipee type shelter (see SeekOutside, Kifaru, etc.) with a stove jack and a collapsible Ti stove. My first stove was a SeekOutside stove which has to be assembled and disassembled with each set up. It is a nice product, but the its last use was when my then eight-year old daughter accompanied me on a trip. As the sun was going down along with the temperature, she was shivering in her sleeping bag asking “when will we be warm?” as I was putting the stove together with little nuts and numbing fingers. I’d been pining for a Four Dog Ti stove for its ease of set-up and take down, larger firebox as well as its increased efficiency (still getting heat but not loading it up as frequently). Since I was primarily interested in base camping outings, I pulled the trigger on the Four Dog stove after this trip.

[Dan @ Durston Gear]

I’ve got the TiGoat cylinder stove, which is roughly 8″ diameter and 12″ long. I like it, but it has caused me to re-evaluate what I’m looking for in a wood stove.

A small stove like this is really only going to provide substantial heat for about 45 min. You can burn it for up to maybe 2 hrs but with not enough heat to really be warm in the tent if it’s cold outside. Because of this, it works well when I’m reading in the evenings but it’s going to go pretty quick once I fall asleep. So it’s not viable if you want a stove that actually keeps your tent warm through the night. Normally it goes out, and then I have to re-light in the mornings. If I spark it up in the morning then it can thaw out my tent/boots as I cook breakfast but it would be more comfortable if I could get 3-4 hrs of decent heat so I only need to stoke it once or twice in the night.

Because of that, the stove doesn’t save me much weight in other gear (e.g. I still need a winter sleeping bag). For others in the market, it’s worth considering whether you want a stove for a bit of evening/morning heat, or if you want to keep your tent warm on a sustained basis.  The other downside with a tiny wood stove is that you need to chop the wood really small which is more work and prevents using larger logs. I would prefer something with a larger firebox that saves me weight (lighter sleeping bag), work (less wood processing) and keeps me warmer through the night, if the weight penalty wasn’t too much. The large U-turn stove from Seek Outside might be a good option for me although I’m not sure it’s large enough to really work practically through the night, since SO says 3-4 stokings which is still every 1.5-2 hrs it seems. I guess I’m a bit spoiled because my Blaze King at home burns for 20 hours pretty easily.

[Philip Tschersich]

I’ve used one of those Four Dog Ti stoves a couple of times. For instance, you can see it at minute 1:50 in this video: Shuyak Island Packraft. They are definitely nice but at 10 pounds are not ‘backpacking’ stoves.  At 3:40 in that same video you see my small Ti Goat WiFi which I carried without issue that whole week: definitely a stove you can bring along.

Dan makes a good point; small stoves are a tradeoff. They don’t burn long and you have to constantly feed them pieces cut quite small. For me the stove isn’t an all-night heat source. It lets you dry your stuff in the evening, you can heat water and cook, it’s suuuuuper cozy, and frankly gives you something to do and enjoy during long hours of darkness. I mean, who doesn’t like a good fire? But it will go cold within an hour of not tending it.

For car camping something like the 4 Dog is nice. For backpacking in marginal conditions, a very light folding stove like the SO U-turn sure is a game changer.

[DAN-Y]

I have found myself almost smoked out of my tent multiple times depending on the chimney draw,

Preheat your stoves flue by using a small stainless steel condiment cup filled with alcohol. After you have your wood stove loaded and ready to light, place the small condiment cup at the rear of the stove on top of the wood pile and ignite it. Let it burn for 3-4 min so it can create a draft while warming the flue, then light your tinder. It will draft well and prevent the smoke filled tent. (if you have dry/seasoned wood)

The steel condiment/dipping cups will be reusable. Purchase them by the dozen. 2.5 oz capacity

amazon.com/Carlisle-602500-Ramekin-Dipping-Stainless/dp/B00H9XBFN2/ref=pd_sbs_79_t_0/135-5959779-4821428?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00H9XBFN2&pd_rd_r=1f853290-62ea-4606-a3b7-2ad5dc7ac14f&pd_rd_w=nfBuJ&pd_rd_wg=EcH0I&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=Q53SZ4MJYVC4Z5CVN4JQ&psc=1&refRID=Q53SZ4MJYVC4Z5CVN4JQ

[Franco Darioli]

The heat from a backpacking wood burning stove like the Wi Fi or similar is from the walls of the stove and the chimney.

The Bio Lite is designed to have a cool outside surface so that you don’t get burned handlig it.

My take is that a BioLite (modified with chimney) would be almost totally useless for the intended purpose (heating up the tent and cooking ) as well as beign a total pain having to feed it every few minutes

( i have used a Bio Lite…)

[Kevin @ Seek Outside]

A lot of it is skill, type of wood, and wood prep dependent. Some people claim great useful burn time with small stoves and certain techniques , however I would not get my hopes up. I usually try to set expectations as they are NOT a 500 lb house stove (although getting my house stove to create effective heat for a complete night is not that easy either). Now it is entirely possible to have coals in the morning, but the coals are not creating enough heat to make it so you can sit in the shelter shirtless.

Larger stoves and certain compressed logs create a much longer burn time, however depending on the logs they all have their drawbacks.

 

Kevin

 

[Logan K]

Lite Outdoors is a Canada based company that makes excellent stoves. They are cylinder designs not dissimilar from TiGoat, but they have an excellent vent in the door that works great. In my opinion, they are worth consideration.

I agree with the tradeoff of burn time and fiddle factor vs longer term weight, but as was stated above, for me the ability to dry everything out and wake up warm is worth it! I have found the hot tent to be a total game changer on extended “high exertion” winter trips because I sweat like crazy no matter what.

Have fun with this – I think it is a great investment!

 

Logan

[Matt W]

Wow, nothing better than doing my morning check of the forums to find alot of great conversation on the topic i posted!!

So it sounds like it’s a personal preference between box or cylinder style titanium stoves.  Aside from that, i haven’t really heard about staying away from any particular brand, that they are all a worthwhile investment.

[Adroit]

A friend told me about this wood stove. It might be worth checking out.

I know nothing about them. Enjoy.

Winnerwell Fastfold Titanium Stove

[Tipi Walter]

John Clever has it right—Four Dog stoves are/or used to be the gold standard for hot tent living—including wall tents, yurts and tipis.

I lived in a North Carolina ridgetop tipi for 21 years and always had a stove in the thing—it’s the only way to go versus an open fire.

As others have mentioned, a small woodstove is inefficient and a hassle—because the wood has to be cut very small and the burn time is so short.  The bigger the stove, the better.  Ergo it’s heavier.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of hot tents—backpacking portable hot tents and basecamp—not backpacking—hot tents.  I don’t really see the advantage of daily backpacking with a hot tent—packing up camp and the stove and stove pipe etc—what are you gonna do with hot ashes in the stove on a bone dry windy day with dead grass and dead leaves everywhere??

In the dead of winter on a backpacking trip my Hilleberg Keron tent is my “hot tent” and my WM Puma -15F down bag is my “woodstove”.  This allows me to move on a daily basis without the hassle of using a stove or unrolling a stove pipe or possible ash holes in the tent’s fly etc—and the problem with discarding hot ashes.

A semi-permanent set up is where the hot tent idea shines—set it up and spend a week at one spot and then pack up and move.

My hot tent set ups were permanent—years at one spot, in fact.  One time I built a Witu lodge (wigwam) and used a small portable woodstove inside—built like a big sweatlodge with saplings and canvas etc—here’s a pic on Chickasaw Creek in TN—notice the small stove pipe.

Another option is to use a Mr Buddy heater and put a propane tank outside with a long hose—I traded in my Witu lodge for a 12×12 Cabelas Xtreme weather dome tent.

My first Tipi woodstove was a busted up thing I found in a dumpster—and completely upgraded with new sides and plenty of stove cement.  It was a little heavy but I humped it up the mountain on a 1 mile trail with a gain of about 1,000 feet—a nut haul.

[Philip Tschersich]

“So it sounds like it’s a personal preference between box or cylinder style titanium stoves.”

Cylinder stoves can be slightly lighter in construction since so much of the stove’s fire box is thin foil, but you are dealing with a curved top surface and so heat transfer to a pot is worse than on a flat-top box stove. Most cylinder stoves will have assembly rods that help stabilize the pot sitting on top, but over time the weight of the pot will deform the rods and the cylinder. The TG WiFi (and maybe the new SO U-turn… we will see) combines the best of both worlds by using the lightness of the Ti foil (sides) with a flat top.

We often burn driftwood in our stoves, and the salt in the wood creates chlorine gas when it combusts and eats away at the Ti (which normally has an impervious oxide surface). For us, the damper on the WiFi is the first to go since it is carrying the weight of the stack (stove pipe) and gets the brunt of the hot gasses. The thin walls of the fire box can also erode over time. The legs of the WiFi are outside the combustion chamber while on the SO stoves they pass through the chamber. The WiFi can use aluminum legs/assembly rods since they aren’t subject to the direct heat from the fire. A friend’s SO box stove had the legs corrode badly from the combo of direct heat and burning driftwood. If you aren’t burning driftwood, the stoves should last quite a while.

[Franco Darioli]

.The WiFi stove

No Roger, it does not have WiFi built in…

(the name was a joke based on the speed it can be assembled with as opposed to the fiddly set up of some. I strongly suggest to watch a clip on how to put these stoves together before buying one)

[Tipi Walter]

Some questions for people who use these Seek Outside type of stoves—

**  When I use a woodstove in any configuration I like to have it “air tight”—obviously these stoves are not air tight.  Is this a problem when the stove “coughs” out smoke in certain conditions?  (Conditions like a heavy rain, a high wind, heavy snowfall—and a stove pipe Cap really helps in this regard—learned thru experience, i.e. when a high wind goes across an open pipe it tends to push smoke back down into the stove—a cap prevents this about 80% of the time).

**  What is the lifespan of the stove pipe?  My stove pipes had to be replaced about twice a winter due to creosote buildup, rain/snow on the pipe, and high heat that comes with use.

**  What is the lifespan of the bottom of the stove—its floor?

Obviously these questions can only be answered by people who have used these stoves extensively.

[DAN-Y]

Adapt/modify this one, use it as a broiler to cook your food:

 

[Franco Darioli]

So versatile and only 26kg / 57lbs.

[Author]

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