TL;DR - The Jetboil Zip was amazing. It boils water quickly and doesn't use much fuel. It is light and packs conveniently.
Compact convenience.
Initially I wasn't really sure about the Jetboil Zip for two reasons:
- It only does one thing - boil water.
- I didn't like that it uses a whole different type of fuel (butane/propane mix) than our regular camp stove.
In the end though, this thing turned out to be amazing. Highly recommended for backpacking.
Two cups of boiling water in two minutes.
Pro
- It packs down very compactly. All the bits - including a 100g fuel container - fit into the cup, keeping it tidy and making it easy to find everything when you need it. We even discovered that you can store a lighter in the bottom of the cup (near the heat sink), so that's always on hand, too!
- It boils water fast. Surprisingly so.
- It's light. The whole thing - with cup - weighed less than the MSR Whisperlight stove we were originally going to bring with us. And the Whisperlight needed heavier fuel, too.
- It hardly uses any fuel. We purchased two 230g canisters and one 100g canister; we used only a small fraction of one of the 230g canisters over the course of 4 nights / 12 meals.
Compact convenience.
Con
- It's difficult to fit the tripod base onto the bottom of the fuel cans. It's doable, but a pain in the ass. Eventually, we just set the can on ground, which worked great.
- The cup has a channel that allows it to "lock in" to the base / stove. Conceptually this is a good idea, but in practice, it's hard to separate when the water is boiling. Our solution was to not use the locking channel, so we could just life the cup off the base when we needed to pour.
In this Series
