Emergency Pop Can Alcohol Stove

I’ve been busy today making emergency pop can alcohol stoves.  I think I will put these in our vehicles and our 72 hour emergency kits.  These are very easy to make and a great little stove for emergency preparedness.  You can go HERE, to see how to make your own stove.  In the video, he uses a knife to cut the top out of the can but a can opener saved me a lot of time and worked great.  My husband and I rarely drink pop so my cousin collected a bunch of empty pop cans for me to make my stoves. 

Here is a picture of our (mostly my cousin) version of the pop can stove kit.  Each kit includes a rectangle tin (7.5”x5”x2.5”…found at Dollar Tree store), 1 pop can stove (cut to desired height to fit in kit), 2 bottles of 91% isopropyl alcohol (the higher percent alcohol seems to burn better), two metal rods (3/16”x5.5”) to fit in tin slots (cut two 1/4” wide and not quite 1/4” deep slots on both of the long sides of your tin, using tin snips) for making it easier to put cooking pans on, matches, and a snuffer (also found at the Dollar Tree store) to extinguish the fire.

After putting my pop can stove and metal rods in place, I was ready to start my fire.

I first poured alcohol into my pop can stove (Whatever amount you use is fine).  Whatever alcohol is not used can be dumped back into my alcohol bottles to use at a later time).  Next I lit my match and held it above the alcohol in my stove.  This takes a little practice to see how high to hold the match.  Alcohol starts burning clear so you may not even know that the fire is going.  Be careful while doing this.

After getting my fire going, I was ready to start cooking.  For today, I just boiled water to see how the stove worked.  You can hardly tell there is a fire but you can slightly see a flame just below the top ridge of the pop can stove.

It wasn’t long before the water started steaming.

I stood watching it for a little while, waiting for it to come to a boil.  It was taking longer than I was patient for so I decided to put a lid on my pot.

Not long after putting the lid on, I started to see steam all around the pot.  I waited a few more minutes before taking the lid off and by that time, my water was starting to boil

To extinguish the fire, you cannot just blow it out, you need to put something over it to snuff it out.  It snuffs out really fast so you can actually even use something plastic to do this.  You don’t need to push the snuffer down……………just drop it over top of the pop can stove and it douses it fairly quickly.  Wait for your stove to cool (this doesn’t take long) before removing the snuffer.

Just like any outdoor fire cooking, this will make your pan black, just like the black you can see on the metal rods in the above picture.  I had fun making these and just knowing I have them while traveling puts me a little more at ease should I break down somewhere.  I guess I should explain that I live over 100 miles from a lot of my destinations with a whole lot of desert and open space in between.  And, if the power ever goes out for any length of time, I know that I have another way of cooking a pot of beans or anything else.  A fun little stove to have.