The burning question

So, I've tried a bit of cold soak, but for a longer trip or for colder nights it's nice to be able to cook up something warm.  So that brings the perennial question of what stove?

In the past for trips I've always used a Trangia most recently variants on the one man mini version. But I have a collection of old Meta stoves as well.  That's small stoves that burn meta tablets - or Esbit tablets these days. So my plan is to use one of those together with a Vargo Triad burner. 

The burner is titanium and a lot lighter than the traditional Trangia brass one. Yes. It's more than a soda can stove but so far I've been to lazy to make one of those. :) 

The stove uses alcohol, or you can turn it over and use it with Esbit tablets or gel. 

There's always a first time for everything so yesterday I fired it up with 3dl of water in a Meta 71 pot. The stove took a long time getting going (the alcohol needs to gas off to get a full burn). Once it did it was 6 minutes twenty to get a boil. Slow...  But to be honest I don't mind. What else am I going to do out on a bare mountain? 

More interesting is how much fuel does it use?  As best I could measure all up 8g. If we say 20 that gives 20 burns off a 250ml bottle with circa 200g of fuel.   That's not bad. 

The weight.. 24g for the stove and 65g for the pot. I may swap the lid for just foil dropping it to 50g. And it needs  a windshield. 14g. 

So 88g in total plus fuel.  And for that I get coffee, tea, soup, porridge and a variety of warm cold soak meals. Not bad I reckon. 

Reading afterwards slow starting is a known problem, most easily solved by burning a few drops of fuel under the stove in e.g. a bottle top or the base from a soda can. That'll be my next test! :)