Carbon monoxide emissions from camping stoves is not something that is much talked about (beyond the manufacturers’ leaflets saying ‘do not use inside a tent’, which is like a car manual saying ‘do not drive when raining’). But earlier today I got a poignant reminder, this is, in fact, a real issue.

The only serious discussion of this I ever came across was about a decade ago on the Backpacking Light site, though I think the series in question was already a decade old by then. But I no longer have a subscription, so can’t go back to check the details.

The gist of it, as far as I recall: they did a test of a wide range of camping stoves, and it turned out the CO emissions varied greatly, and in some cases were outright deadly. Reading that series of articles became an impetus for replacing my old MSR PocketRocket with a SnowPeak GigaPower, which did quite well in that test, and which is, indeed, a much better stove in general.

But by then I was doing a fair bit of fast packing, and most of my cooking was on a minimalist alcohol burner. And one of the things I recall from that series was that alcohol stoves didn’t do so well in that test.

With alcohol stoves the performance of the stove (i.e., the quality of combustion and efficiency) comes down largely to the windshield design (as the air flow is entirely passive), so the main takeaway for me from that was (a) to make sure the alcohol burner was not oxygen starved by the windshield, and (b) to always have the top of the tent above the stove open to vent.

Fast forward a decade or so. Yesterday I got myself a new camping kettle from Decathlon, and this morning was testing if it could be used with our Trangia (the smaller type 27). Thing is, while the kettle is too big to sit properly on the supports when they are folded in, and at the same too small to sit on them when folded out, it sits rather neatly on the support hinges when they are folded in, leaving a small gap between it and the permitter of stove, so it looked feasible.

Indeed, the test in our kitchen went pretty well, that is, until the CO detector kicked in. The really scary part of this is, this happened in spite of the stove being under the cooker hood, with the extractor on.

Anyway, I won’t be using the kettle like that, that’s for sure, there clearly isn’t enough clearance for sufficient draft around the burner. But perhaps someone among the current generation of outdoor influencers could revisit this issue in depth, probably more value in that than in yet another waterproofs review.