I don't have the answer, but I'm tossing in some food for thought: Using a stove - any stove - is much more fuel efficient than any open-air burning. You can improvise something to the same effect with some food cans or other container-like objects made of steel/iron. If you can't or choose not to make a stove, at least try being a little creative with the fireplace. Lifting the base of the fire off the ground has done wonders...


What you don't have from a stove is radiant heat from open flame. You do have less intense radiant heat from the stove walls. And since you're able to come closer to a blazing stove than a blazing fireplace, you get the benefit of warm air circulation from the stove walls - excellent for drying you and your clothes.

Feeding a small stove through the night with twig-size material will be a tedious nightmare. A bigger stove could sustain itself for maybe a few hours, but probably not the entire night. But neither would most campfires...

The biggest potential of a stove is not really realized unless you also have a pipe - and THAT is hard to improvise. The pipe will allow you to put the stove in a closed shelter nirvana (don't forget ventilation holes). Dream on, grasshopper, that aint gonna happen unless you bring a complete stove+pipe unit with you. Even without a pipe, a stove has significant benefits: The combustion is hotter, meaning hotter and cleaner smoke that rises faster. Meaning less smoke in your eyes.


Google hobo stoves, they're really something you should be experienced with. Blast has described how to make the sophisticated wood gasifier stove out of tin cans on his blog. Talk about advanced scrap yard physics ... Unless you've already made one of those I say skip the gasifier project and go for the hobo stove, which you just can't go wrong with.


As with most things, stoves are not a do-all-fix-all solution, but they're very handy and fuel efficient and definitely something you should have in your fire skills arsenal. That being said, outside in the cold without sleeping bag I would kick efficiency in the but and aim for a big, blazing fire with reflector in front of whatever shelter I could make.