Lightweight Stoves

Find lightweight stoves with the features you're looking for.

How Much Lighter are Lightweight Stoves?

A glance at the list of lightweight stoves page shows that there are some almost ridiculously light stoves on the market. The lightest stove, the Trail Designs GramCracker comes in at an astonishing 3 grams. That's about half a gram more than a penny weighs. Not bad.

But the GramCracker is a tablet stove, which isn't the kind of stove that most people are looking for. So how light can you get when considering more conventional fuel sources, like canister stoves for instance? The Primus Gravity EF II Stove weighs in at 264 grams, or .6 pounds. The Snow Peak LiteMax Stove, on the other hand, another canister stove, weighs in at just 53 grams, or .1 pounds....

Primus Gravity EF II Stove - 264 grams / .6 pounds
Snow Peak LiteMax Stove - 53 grams / .1 pounds

The Snow Peak LiteMax is a sixth of the weight of the Primus Gravity EF II, and yet does the exact same thing. With a little careful planning, you can drastically reduce the weight of your backpack by considering options like lightweight stoves.

Common Features of Lightweight Stoves

There are a few common manufacturing features and techniques that you'll find on some of the more lightweight stoves.

Alcohol Stove - Take a look at the list of lightweight stoves and you'll see that amazingly the 15 lightest stoves are all either alcohol stoves or tablet stoves. Alcohol stoves are extremely simple to manufacture, easy to use, and cheap, which makes them very popular with lightweight backpacking enthusiasts. Keep in mind though that often what you're getting is a barebones stove that you'll need to augment with stands and windscreens to really make function well. Most alcohol stove manufacturers make these accessories, and Clikstand is another popular manufacturer of said accessories.
Alternative Fuel Sources - More generally, forgoing conventional canister and liquid fuel stoves makes for a lighter stove, as the fuel usually weighs less. There's alcohol stoves, tablet stoves, and even wood stoves if you're backpacking somewhere forested. Considering the weight of the fuel and the fuel container should be part of your stove buying decision, which certainly makes wood stoves a more appealing alternative.

Drawbacks of Lightweight Stoves

When going to a lightweight stove, most of the metal that gets trimmed would have otherwise gone to stabilizing whatever you've got on top of the stove. As I talked about above, you can always get different accessories for your stove that will help mitigate this, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a lightweight stove. Like most pieces of lightweight backpacking equipment, the drawbacks come down more to lack of knowledge and experience than anything else. Picking a cooking spot on level ground and out of the wind, for instance, will go a long ways to reducing any stability problems you might have with a lightweight stove.