 Greetings friends! This is Survival Doc. Today I'm going to do a review of the solo stoves. I got the light stove which is supposed to be good for one to two people for my backpack. It only has two parts or two freely moving parts. The stove itself and the pot support. So there's not a lot to rattle around in your backpack like some stoves that I've used. And to prevent that from rattling what I do is I tuck this part in and I pack the stove like that. And then my backpack there's no noise at all. The light version weighs only nine ounces. It is four and a quarter inches wide and three and an eight I mean 3.8 inches tall when packed like this. It's made out of 304 stainless steel except for the grid which is nichrome wire. I got the larger version for my kitchen as an emergency stove. This is the campfire for the largest solo stove. Pack it weighs pack it is 6.7 inches tall and seven inches wide. Assembled it is nine and a quarter inches tall and it weighs 2.2 pounds but again I'm not concerned about the weight for this stove because this for my kitchen I'm not going to be packing it out. The way the solo stove works is it's called a gasification type stove. Air goes into the vents down here. They come up under here and burn the material you have sitting here on the grid. Alright some of the air also goes up. This is a double chamber. Some of the air goes up and comes out right here and is heated in the process of rising and then the heated oxygen comes out here and there's a second burn here. This was called a gasification stove and so you get little smoke because what it does is it burns the material twice. It burns the material in here and it also burns the gases coming up here so you get very little smoke supposedly. I'm going to try these out here in a little bit but you get it a very efficient burn, a very hot burn and little smoke. The solo light is just the right size for your pots and pans that you go backpacking with. But what I really like about it is this is what I take with me when I'm backpacking my stainless steel canteen and the solo stove is one of the few stoves I've seen which fits this equipment like a glove. This is where you add your sticks as it's burning. You can also cook in this canteen of course or you can heat water in it. If it's on there perfectly even has this this little notch here where you add fuels even have this little cut out here which makes it even easier to add fuel. This is what I really like about this because this is when I'm backpacking of course my concern is weight not having to carry a lot of materials. This is the canteen I carry. It's the canteen cut and they both work perfectly on this smaller stove. My kitchen version or the campfire as they call it accommodates any size pot pretty much that you'd have in your your kitchen. I can even put my six quart pressure cooker on top of this stove. Frying pan is truly a family-size stove and what we're going to do is we're going to take these out in the field and I'm going to collect some sticks. I really like the fact that you don't have to carry fuel with you with these stoves especially like the backpacking stove. Don't have to carry fuel it'll burn sticks twigs leaves whatever you can find to burn in it. So when you're packing out with this stove only nine ounces in a small compact. For more details on these stoves and to get all of the stats all the specs you can go to the official website solostove.com solostove.com. Now the smaller version the light it retails for $100 but the official website is actually selling them for $70 and $70 is quite expensive. You can get stoves that burn with the similar process on Amazon.com for much much less but after looking at those and looking at my needs and I figured this will be stoves the stove both of these will be the stoves that will last me a lifetime. I don't mind going ahead and putting the investment in something that I'm gonna get so much use of. The camfire stove official price is $150 but they are selling them on the solo stove website for $110. You might be able to find these a little bit cheaper on Amazon.com. Here's how the website describes it. Designed with a double wall the solo stove is a natural convection inverted down gas gasifier stove. The air intake holes on the bottom of the stove channel air to the bottom of the fire while at the same time channels warm air up between the walls of the stove. This burst of preheated oxygen feeding back into the firebox through the smaller hose at the top causes a secondary combustion. This allows the fire to burn more complete which is why there is very little smoke during full burn. A more efficient burn also means you'll use much less wood compared to an open campfire. The solo stove doesn't just burn wood it actually cooks the smoke out of the wood and then burns the smoke not once but twice. The cooking ring is angled up it has this angled up lip also increases efficiency by allowing oxygen to flow inward towards your pot minimizing heat loss. It also acts as a windshield while still allowing oxygen to flow inward. Four big old fat burgers are going on there now. Mmm good hamburger. If you look through some of my videos you'll see that at one point in the past I did a review of the Kelly kettle. This is my Kelly kettle I have two versions of this one as well like this is the smaller one I also have the largest one. Alright the Kelly kettle I like the Kelly kettle it burns it boils water very rapidly this is double walled your water goes in here your material burns down here again it burns sticks into age you find in the field which is what I like about it. Alright it has the chimney effect or the drawl pulls air in down here which helps material burn very quickly get a hot fire. The difference is the way I understand it is whereas the solo stoves have the gasification process where they burn the smoke so you get more efficiency and you also get less smoke. The Kelly kettle does not burn the gases and as you can see there is quite a buildup even though I cleaned this with a stainless steel scrubber but you can see there is the buildup of the black soot or creosote I guess is what it is and the Kelly kettle does put out a lot of smoke so I'm hoping to get away from that I'm hoping to get a more efficient burn with the solo stove. Another disadvantage of the Kelly kettle is pretty much all it does is boil water and that's very very quick and efficient at boiling water it will boil water in no time. Alright but they do make a grid that fits on the top of here and I have one but it just doesn't get hot enough up here to do anything on that grid really. They also make a grid that you can put down here to cook things once your fire gets hot down here that doesn't really work to my satisfaction either because when you take this off to put the grid on you lose the chimney effect. So I've used this out in the field many times I backpack with it it is very efficient at boiling water so it's great when you have freeze-dried food where all you have to do is just add boiling water to your food let it sit for 10 minutes and eat it but that's pretty much all this will do in my opinion is boil water and again the disadvantage is it's a lot larger it is a lot obviously it's a lot heavier than this stove which is why I went ahead and invested in this stove right here this is so much lighter plus you can cook anything on here you can cook with the pans or anything fry fish on top of this one you're not going to fry a fish on top of the kettle and the weight this stove weighs essentially the same as just the base of this stove the whole stove weighs as much as the base and you can imagine this takes up a lot more space in your backpack it's not really a backpack and stove in my opinion now one thing I thought about is I thought about well what if you combine the two and it actually the smaller Kettle Kettle really fits well on top of the solo stove light so that's another thing I'm going to try now I don't want to backpack this thing because this thing is too heavy but at times where you're going out and you're not carrying this in your backpack carrying it in your vehicle or something I'm interested in how this will work as far as boiling water is concerned of course I could just boil water in my canteen as I showed before but I'm thinking with this and with that chimney effect combined with the solo stove and the water inside this container here I'm thinking it's going to burn very efficiently with the chimney effect in addition to this and also as I figure it's going to boil water even quicker but there's totally unnecessary that's not why I bought it I just noticed that it does fit and I'm curious to try that out now my large Kelly kettle does not fit on this stove properly so that's not something I'll be using with this though I don't have the Titan stove or the one that's in the middle here between these sizes here I'm not sure if the Titan stove would work on my large Kelly kettle or not this is survival doc reminding you be prepared or be prepared to be fleeced