Experience in operating a wood chip stove on hikes

For more than five years now, I have periodically taken the so-called Bond stove (model
Airwood ) or wood chips. It has proven to be a reliable and effective alternative to gas burners and fires. In terms of boiling time for a liter of water, wood chippers are in no way inferior to them. You can easily cook on a Bond stove even for a large group (10 or more people). Of course, it also has disadvantages, the main one of which is high labor costs on the part of the “firemaker”. Read about this and other features of using a wood chipper while hiking in my review below...

Features of the wood chip stove

Without a fan, the stove is completely useless. It is the artificial injection of air that makes the wood chipper effective. You will say that there are models without fans, where supposedly everything is solved by natural draft, magical pyrolysis and double walls... So - that’s all nonsense. Only a normal air flow (read fan) is capable of turning a piece of iron into a turbo stove.
Unlike a gas burner, you cannot leave a wood chipper for more than a minute. The wood in the combustion chamber burns out very quickly and you need to constantly add new wood chips. Ideally, this feeding process should be completely continuous. Sit next to the stove and continuously throw one branch inside until the water boils (the food is cooked).
The power of the wood chipper is enough to boil 5-7 liters of water. But I’m not so confident in its strength and stability, and therefore I don’t place heavy pots directly on Bond’s stove, but use a taganka or a suspension for this.
Unlike a fire, a wood chipper can easily work under a low awning or in an OPEN and spacious vestibule tent (which, of course, is prohibited by the rules of the fire safety regulations). In order not to drown in smoke, it makes sense to organize additional ventilation - create a draft. However, you should not abuse this opportunity. This is dangerous (tent fire, poisoning by combustion products) and simply uncomfortable (everything smells like smoke).
During the work process, not all the ashes spill out through the grate. And if the wood chipper operates continuously for more than 40 minutes, then most likely the ash will block the air supply, the draft will drop significantly and cleaning will be required.
The fan runs on two AAA batteries. New batteries usually last for at least 2 weeks of daily use.

How to light a wood chipper

Fill the combustion chamber with twigs. It is desirable that the bottom layer (adjacent to the grate) consists mainly of thin and dry wood chips.
Crumple up 2 squares of toilet paper, put it on the ground, place the stove on top.
Remove the fan from the stove and turn it on. Do not hang it back yet.
Light the paper through the cutout for the fan.
Gently (so as not to blow out the flame) bring the running fan to the stove and secure it.
In most cases, the stove lights up within a minute. After this, you can put the pot on and start refueling.

Preparing firewood for Bond's stove.

Formally, the wood chipper can operate on any solid fuel. You can shove wood, cones, paper, straw or dried manure there. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to test the operation of the wood chipper on coal or peat. But in most cases, you will still “feed” Bond’s stove with ordinary twigs. And regarding this firewood there are very specific recommendations:

As I wrote above, a turbo stove requires continuous refueling to operate effectively. Once the flame burns, you won't have time to find and chop up twigs. Therefore, if you are working alone, it makes sense to first chop up enough wood and then light the fire.
In order to boil 1 liter of water you need about 200 grams of wood chips. It may well be that this dependence is nonlinear and to boil 3 liters a large pot with a wide bottom needs not 600 grams of firewood, but only 500. This hypothesis requires additional verification, for which I have not yet found time on my hikes. combustion chamber. Moreover, flames will stream from the slot towards you, and your view will be limited due to the pot. Therefore, do not even hope that you will be able to feed the wood chipper with long branches of 15 cm, or even more so with voluminous branched “brooms”. In my opinion, the optimal type of firewood for a wood chipper is straight and even sticks about 5 cm long and 1-2 cm in diameter. There should be no branches on the wood. You can use your own finger or an AA battery as a sample. If the wood is longer, it will be more difficult to push it into the combustion chamber. If they are much thicker, then the clogging of the ash air will accelerate. Thin branches burn out faster and you will need to throw them into the firebox with redoubled zeal.
The branches of some types of wood can be difficult to break into such small fragments by hand. After all, 5 cm is a rather short lever. Carrying a hatchet for the sake of wood chipping is not very sporty. Therefore, we get out with the means at hand. For example, you can chop (rather break) branches using a massive stone with a sharp edge. Or find a narrow crack in the rock and break branches in it.
Unlike a fire, a wood chipper is a fairly mobile design. To make moving easier and reduce losses, I immediately put the chopped branches in a bag (rather than dumping them in a heap on the ground).
Since you need little firewood, even in the wettest parking lots you can usually find enough relatively dry branches. Therefore, in 5 years I have never had the opportunity to cook dinner on completely wet wood. But I burned a huge amount of just raw branches.
I hide the twigs prepared for preparing breakfast under the awning at night. There they definitely won’t get wet and, on the contrary, they will most likely dry out.

Malfunctions and breakdowns of the turbo stove

Over the 5 years of operation, my turbo stove periodically experienced minor malfunctions, most of which have so far been dealt with directly in field mode. Here are the main ones:

The fan impeller is made of metal, but the bushing to which it is attached is plastic. And one day, for unknown reasons, this bushing overheated during operation and melted. Perhaps this happened due to dead batteries and reduced fan speed, or maybe the grass under the fan caught fire and scorched it. The point is different - the melted bushing began to slip inside the impeller. The draft created by the fan dropped significantly and the stove became ineffective (the water did not boil for a long time). Fortunately, the problem was solved with a few drops of glue and has not recurred since.

The fan switch stopped working at some point. Perhaps he was clogged with ash. There was no time to figure out the reasons and change the toggle switch in the middle of the hike, so I simply connected the wires directly, bypassing the toggle switch. Now in order to turn off the fan you need to remove the battery. And so that during transportation and storage less ash from the combustion chamber gets into the fan unit (into the electric motor and batteries), I wrap the fan in an additional bag.

The stainless steel from which the walls of the wood chipper are made gradually burns out and loses its strength and elasticity. This is especially true for the stove extension (also known as a stand for a pot). If earlier I could easily place pots weighing 4-5 kg on it, now I try to load it no more than 1-2 kg.

On what trips does it make sense to take a wood chipper?

Personally, I usually take a wood chipper on a camping trip as an addition to the fire. For example, in Turkey it is allowed to burn fires on the Lycian Way, and under normal conditions we do so. It's very cool to sit by the fire. But if we spend the night in a place with a limited amount of firewood or it starts to rain, then I take out the wood chipper. It requires much less wood than an open fire. You can simply walk along the beach with a bag, collect fragments of reeds thrown out by the sea, and dinner is guaranteed. But in Europe, where fires are prohibited on most routes, I don’t use a wood chipper. Whatever one may say, it is more fire hazardous than a burner. And I absolutely don’t want to prove to the rangers that I’m not a villain and didn’t intend to ruin their precious forest. Likewise, wood chips seem out of place to me in the highlands (above the forest zone). I can still imagine dragging a kilogram of finely chopped brushwood up to the pass. But dancing with a tambourine (feeding the stove with twigs) in a snowstorm can undermine your morale. I don't recommend it.

From the point of view of saving weight in a backpack, the wood chipper can outperform compact gas burners (60 g) only at long distances. If I were going on an autonomous trip for a couple of months (through the forest, forest-steppe or semi-desert), I would probably take a turbo stove.

Kirill Yasko, January 17, 2019.