Foxster
Section Hiker
I've kept an eye on these stove-to-power gizmos for a while and even had a go at making my own. They suffer from some fundamental problems...
1. They can't make much power despite the claims because they can't get a good heat differential needed to generate electricity. In practice this has meant some mobile devices not charging at all and some getting just a couple of % charge over an extended period.
2. Most of us boil water in three minutes. Some us might run a stove for, say, 10 minutes to cook some food. Neither of these is long enough to charge a device. This means repeated and extended boiling.
The dedicated device above looks the most promising but, as pointed out, it is heavy and uses a lot of gas. Perhaps useful when car camping, but then you could use the car battery anyway. Might be useful to some with a wood fire but it doesn't look rugged enough to go on a large enough wood fire.
They suffer from a fundamental problem of a great deal of energy being wasted in the conversion from gas to hot water to electricity. Of promise is the idea of a catalytic micro-combustion device that you feed with camping gas to generate electricity. These have the potential to be more efficient but I suspect they might be expensive and heavy.
1. They can't make much power despite the claims because they can't get a good heat differential needed to generate electricity. In practice this has meant some mobile devices not charging at all and some getting just a couple of % charge over an extended period.
2. Most of us boil water in three minutes. Some us might run a stove for, say, 10 minutes to cook some food. Neither of these is long enough to charge a device. This means repeated and extended boiling.
The dedicated device above looks the most promising but, as pointed out, it is heavy and uses a lot of gas. Perhaps useful when car camping, but then you could use the car battery anyway. Might be useful to some with a wood fire but it doesn't look rugged enough to go on a large enough wood fire.
They suffer from a fundamental problem of a great deal of energy being wasted in the conversion from gas to hot water to electricity. Of promise is the idea of a catalytic micro-combustion device that you feed with camping gas to generate electricity. These have the potential to be more efficient but I suspect they might be expensive and heavy.