Four different lightweight homemade backpacking stoves covered here

Comparison of cheap DIY alcohol stoves

Fun to build too - maybe add one to various kits?

Teacher

I have also been doing some research on alcohol stoves and found this sight to be the most helpful for me. Partly because the site is not trying to sell or promote anything. Purely informative. I talked with Rantor and ended up getting the same stove he purchaced for his DW. One the topics I found most interesting is the fuels that could be used and the positives / negatives of each type. If you want to check it out, here is the site Zen and the Art of the Alcohol Stove

Another source for stove plans is Wings THE HOME-MADE STOVE ARCHIVES.

28 plans plus links.

I have made just about every stove on the wings site. All work, some much better/worse than others. But I will stick with my "off white box stove" as the best of the bunch...

I've tried a few alcohol stoves and I like the Super Cat. It's easy to make, easy to use, and works great with my MSR pot

I use a variant of the Photon stove (which is basically a pressure jet container). The trick is adding a little alcohol to preheat the sides/top of the stove and then the internal alcohol evaporates under pressure and shoots out the tiny jets and ignites. A full stove (1.75 oz) will run for about 12 minutes with a really good flame for the first few minutes. It's almost silent and in fair weather (above 5*C) is almost as good as my cannister stove. When the temperature gets below 0*C, the performance suffers.

The cost is slightly more than some alcohol stoves as I use heat resistant WB Weld to seal the seams to make it truly pressure tight. Next up for me to make is the penny alcohol stove which has been getting good reviews.

The alcohol stove is cheap, the fuel is cheap and my kit is lighter than my cannister stove. The thing is once you figure out how to build them, you can use them for practically any fuel and are therefore great for your survival kit. As an alternate, you can invert them and burn Esbit tablets on the base.

PS. DO NOT use gasoline or Coleman fuel in a pressure alcohol stove - use a Cat or other variant alcohol stove instead. The pressure will build up too much and may explode or at the very least burst a seam!

I have made 7 or 8 homemade alcohol stoves, and while it’s fun, I find a lot of the homemade stoves very fragile. They are designed to be super light to keep backpacking weight down. For an alcohol stove that is durable and can handle some use and abuse the Trangia burner is my choice. It also has the advantage of being able to be transported with fuel in it. Also other alcohol stoves you have to just let it run dry to put it away. Trangia can be put out and the fuel in it saved for the next meal. I found the complete military Trangia kits at a local army surplus store for $3.50, they were closing them out. The normal price for the complete stove & mess kit is only $12.00. A great deal at either price.

This may make me sound profoundly ignorant but, can a homemade boil water?

Yup. Very well in fact, depending of course on the amount of water, outside temp, winds, altitude, etc...

Alcohol has ½ the btu output for the same amount of white gas (gasoline) so they are not as hot burning as a normal stove. But they are more then enough to do the job. You can cook on them just fine. I regularly use one to cook eggs, bacon soups the complete dinners you find at grocery stores. The problem with alcohol stoves in for the most part they have no simmer and you can’t turn them down. That and at most they run for 15-min on a fill up. But this is normally more then enough. If not just pour some more alcohol in it and keep going. Alcohol flames are hard to see in daylight, so make sure it’s out before you refill it.