Choosing the best Wood Stove for your Hot Tent

When you are camping in a snow covered wilderness, there is nothing that brightens the spirits and brings smiles as quickly as the feeling of warmth and light of the fire crackling within the wood stove in your hot tent. There is simply something captivating and mood altering about the experience. Caveman TV, as it is often called, not only warms your spirits and dries your gear but it can be useful for cooking and melting snow as well. In some instances, it has literally been life saving. In our 14 years of designing and manufacturing Hot Tents and Wood Stoves, we have learned a few things and provided advice to countless adventurers. However, it's important to select the right wood stove for your hot tent. In this article, we'll explore the key considerations to keep in mind to ensure you choose the best wood stove for your hot tent. Please note, you can have several stoves for the same tent and use them depending on the circumstance.

What is Your Use Case: Are you going to use the stove to take the chill off of a cool mid fall morning, or are you going to use the stove to keep you warm in the dead of winter in the BWCA ? How are you carrying the stove ? Is packability and portability important ? How large is your tent ? What are your expectations ? Before diving into the specifics of the world of hot tent wood stoves, take some time to reflect on your specific camping requirements. Consider factors such as the mode of travel, the size of your hot tent, the expected temperatures, the duration of your trips, and desired level of comfort. Understanding these needs will help you narrow down your options and make a more informed decision. Below, we will go into the factors.

Mode Of Travel: Foot, Fly and Two Wheel Travel, favors, breakdown wood stoves that are light and portable. Float trips can vary. If you can take a sled (Snow machine, Pulk Sled, ) you can go with a large less packable stove. Vehicles are really only limited by your hot tents capabilities and stove port / exit style. For a one stove solution, choose your most extreme or minimal. For instance, if you backpack in ⅓ of the time, float some, and do vehicle based the rest of the time, choose the best stove for backpacking, maybe slightly larger for vehicle and flair trips.

Size of Hot Tent: Not only is it needed for a larger tent to have a larger stove, there is also more space so how much space the stove takes up is less of an issue. In smaller tents, a large stove can take up too much space.

Expected Temperatures: If the temperature dips below freezing a little, a little stove to take the chill off may be plenty and anything else is excess. However, if the expected temperatures are consistently below 20 F , most people will start to prefer a stove capable of holding more wood and providing more heat.

Desired Comfort Level: Some users may want to just take the chill off, while others may want to be able to sit around in their underwear.

Since Seek Outside primarily provides packable titanium wood stoves for self powered travel, these considerations are more specific to the type of stoves we design and manufacture.

Other Considerations for Hot Tent Wood Stoves:

• Wood preparation: The smaller the stove, the more prep. However, some people prefer to burn smaller twigs they can hand break, others want good size rounds that burn longer and more moderately. For those users, a small stove, and small sticks burn hot and fast and provide quick heat. That may be plenty. To get longer burn times, others may prefer to really cut some logs, that burn slower and longer.
• Stove Pipe Storage: Roll up stove pipes are much more packable and portable.
• Damper / Spark Arresting: A good damper can do a great job of moderating heat output and burn time. A spark arrestor not only helps protect your tent from sparks, and one that can be cleaned such as the Seek Outside flapper arrestor, can keep you from smoking yourself out of a tent. What happens is if your pipe gets sooty, sometimes that soot can clog an arrestor at the top or bottom of the stove preventing air flow. We won’t go into why it happens BUT it can happen and is not a pleasant experience when it does. If you can NOT clean the spark arrestor while the stove is running, you have no choice but to kill the fire, get the stove out of your tent, clean it up and start over again.
• Ease of Assembly: This applies only to the break down style wood stoves, that are usually used with portable hot tent systems. Box stoves are generally easier than stoves with foil bodies. Some of the ease is simply being more intuitive.
• Cooking: Stoves with flat tops do the best here.
• Long Term Durability, Long Term Service: This will likely differ based on manufacturer, and how well they support the products they deliver. Our titanium wood stoves have proven very durable. Very little can go wrong with our stoves and we provide options for pieces that wear out. Most damage has been during transport.

Expectations:

Regardless of the stove, expecting a stove to run all night and keep the tent warm is unrealistic. I do not get a full nights burn on my 400 pound plus wood stove at home. However, it is realistic to have coals in the morning, so it is easy to restart the fire in the am by throwing some quick starting pieces in. You can also do a strategy of keeping a fire going all night, by preparing larger rounds and throwing a couple in every couple hours. If people take turns each person may only add wood once an evening.

Conclusion:

Choosing the right wood stove for your hot tent is essential for a comfortable and enjoyable outdoor experience. By considering factors such as size, packability, durability, and ease of use you can find the perfect stove to suit your needs. You can also have multiple wood stoves for the same system, one for vehicle based camping and one for self powered. By considering these factors, it is realistic to sit cozy in your tent, watching the wood stove, while it is snowing outside and feeling you have conquered the winter wonderland.