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Originally Posted by owly
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I'd love to have something like this, but I suspect this is more of a novelty or toy than a practical piece of camping equipment. It might be a better idea to build a device that can be dropped in a campfire.
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Originally Posted by Review
Due to the relatively small size of the stove, you can only burn small twigs and wood scraps. This means that, while the stove heats up quickly, it also necessitates nearly constant stoking. Turn your back on the stove for a couple of minutes to set up your tent or fish out another beer, and your fire has dwindled and the charging system shuts down until it gets roaring again. Constant stoking also meant removing my cook pot repeatedly to add fuel. My friend and I quickly learned that running the stove to charge a device requires constant attention. It is not the kind of thing you can set and forget while you set up camp and come back to a charged iPhone for your evening’s Pink Floyd. We started with a completely discharged iPhone and it took about an hour of trial and error and scrambling around the forest floor looking for twigs to get the phone to about 8%.
Given the design of the BioLite, packing up required thoroughly cleaning out the ash and charred remains of the fire before nesting components back together. Even so, the stylish orange charging unit still ended up streaked and greasy with black residue the next time I took it apart.
Despite these gripes, there is something satisfying and magical to hearing that familiar iPhone “chirp” when charging begins merely from a fire in the woods. The key with the BioLite is setting reasonable expectations. A phone is a potential safety device and having a means to charge it even to 8% can mean the difference between an emergency text message and sending smoke signal semaphores from a hilltop. The BioLite will not power your evening’s entertainment, but that is probably a good thing anyway.
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