LOVE my esbit stove! It goes on every trip and has saved the day many times during fire bans and saved the night many times when I just wanted a hot cup of cocoa without too much fuss.


In this pic, 2 fuel pucks heated a mug of water to perfect drinking temp in about 10 minutes. Next time I use it this way, I'm going to try using a smaller mug and then close the wings of the stove under the rim of the mug, holding it closer to the flame. This mug was just too tall for that.

the other good things about those is that you can use anything that burns for fuel.a dry clean place to put the fuel and a pot stand and your ready to heat/eat

For a couple of years the Esbit was my primary camping/backpacking stove. Very convenient and burns hotter than people think. If the tabs weren't so expensive I'd probably use it more.

What I love about it for prepping is ease of use and shelf-life.

I like the fuel tabs - tough, versatile, and hot, but I don't care for the "stove" - rather clunky and needlessly heavy. You can make far better units from discarded aluminum cans. This is just one more way of paring down the weight of EDC kits.

This my first time trying a stove like this. On the bright side, I have several boxes of various kinds of fuel tablets I managed to acquire somewhere.

I suspect 3 rocks arranged appropriately would work almost as well. Maybe even 3 small piles of dirt.

I did not like that I was unable to light the tablets with a ferro rod.

I read somewhere, maybe here, that you can light the tabs with a ferro rod if you scrape them to make shavings/powder. I've never tried it, but fatwood and shoe fungus work the same way so it makes sense to me.

You can also use the fuel tabs without the stove. They make great fire starters in wet conditions.

Esbit will light pretty easily if you scrape a pile of shavings as you would with a magnesium bar. In my tests the hexamine tablets from Coghlan's also could be lit in this manner. However, the "hexamine" tablets from Bluette were a no-go. I nearly wore my Ranger firesteel in two trying to light it with no luck. It lit with a naked flame from a match pretty readily though.

ESBIT is awesome stuff! It lasts nearly forever (I was told 50+ years...there's WWII stuff that's still usable) and burns hot. I always have some hexamine on me while camping. The smaller 4 gram sticks are also great.