Esbit question

[sj49506]

Has anyone used the esbit stove for long distance hiking? Wonder if the weight advantage is worth the loss in cooking efficiency

[deadeye]

My brother used esbit fuel for his AT thru-hike. Worked fine. Big advantage: his wife could buy it in bulk, and mailed it to him. Check with the USPS, but in 1999, it was OK to mail esbit tabs.

[Amigi]

Great backup stove. I have a five pack I keep in my pack. For me here in Fl, sugar sand gets into everything, so if you dont keep constant vigil over cleaning your stove ( like me ), hexy tabs are a good way to cook while cleaning your stove and telling yourself how you'll never let this happen again...

[Iceman]

What in the heck is sugar sand? Sounds sticky...

[Just Plain Jim]

I always carry 6 tabs and the stove as a back up. It does mess up the bottom of the pot, so I keep the pot in a zip-lock after use.

[Amigi]

Sugar sand is about 4 times less coarse than east coast beach sand. It's very fine. Really it's not silicate sand at all, but ground up limestone. It's great to loosen tools with, a little sugar sand and some WD-40 and no tool will every bind again. But the stuff sucks when it in gets somewhere you dont want it. It wont displace by usual means ( water or WD ), and you can clean and clean but there always seems to be some left.
Every week or so when out hiking, I seem to get some into the ports on my JB or Coleman Peak1. I have a welder's tip cleaner in my tools/ducttape/crazyglue ziploc for just such occurences. I used to carry an Ion stove as my back up, but less weight carrying hexy.

[SGT Rock]

They work pretty darn good, I like to have some arround for really light fast packing where you don't want to mess with bottles of fuel - just throw in a tab a day for the trip duration and have a windscreen and stand ready for your pot. The down side is the cost is about 5 times that of alcohol per boil if I remember correctly. So for a thru-hike the cost and the logistics of getting them to yourself on the trail could be a little hard.

[Amigi]

Nice to see you back posting, Rock.

[SGT Rock]

Nice to be back.