Realizing my propane supplies are finite, I wanted something for general cooking and heating water, saving the propane for a better application. I finally found some time to test out my "new" Rocket Stove. I've only had it for a little over a month now! Today was a bit windy which has some impact on the results.
The stove is lined with ceramic and has what appears to be a cast iron top. The stove comes with a rack for your fuel and an adjustable pot ring to focus more of the heat. The ceramic brick on the left is an insert for the top opening, which closes off entirely, allowing one to use the coals as a charcoal burner. The bottom opening is closed in this pic.
Size of fuel used, left over from taking down a tree in the backyard:
I just used one page of newspaper, rolled tight and stuffed into the bottom opening to get the fire started. In total I burned about two handfuls of the smaller twigs and 3/4 of 3 larger ones.
5 minutes and burning pretty good at this point. The metal rack allows you to feed the fuel and it does take some regular tending as you will see in a following picture.
At 10 minutes, the outside is still cool to the touch:
I'm using a 2 quart pot from an aluminum GI cook kit. At 20 minutes I still didn't have boil, so I put the top on the pot. Notice the length of the sticks now. At this point the outside of the stove was too hot to leave your hand on for very long.
. At 30 minutes, covered, I finally was able to achieve a rolling boil. I didn't tighten up the pot ring until about half way and the wind was just too much to get to a boil without covering the pot.
I would guess if the pot ring was adjusted to just a little larger than the pot diameter and I had used the lid earlier, I could have cut 5-7 minutes off the boil time.
Overall, a good purchase given the abundance of fuel.
http://www.stovetec.net/us/index.php