Rather than add to the on-going discussion in other threads, I wanted to give this its own thread as kind of a mini-review.
First Impressions:
Got my FireFly stove in the mail today. This is my third wood stove, and I'm fairly certain it will be my last. I started out with the Ti-Tri caldera cone, got the inferno insert for it, picked up a bushbuddy, and just got this FireFly.
My FireFly weighs in at around 2.7oz with the flexport side option. The reinforced tyvek pouch QiWiz included weighs in at nearly 1/2oz so I probably won't use it. Luckily, the stove came in a great USPS tyvek mailer! I have also found that it fits perfectly on the bottom of my pot cozy underneath my 900ml pot. That would be the ideal way to store it for no weight penalty, but I'm thinking about changing to a smaller pot so that may not be possible anymore.
Had time to do ~5 quick burns in it today and am super impressed with this stove so far. I took it apart and put it together again in between burns just to try to gain more experience with it. Soot on the fingers is a complete non-issue. You handle the sides along the edges, and they basically just fall right into place when you're assembling it.
Feeding wood through the top with a pot on it is easy enough - par for the course, pretty much. The flexport is cool to have but I don't really see myself using it all that often. Kind of wish I had gotten it as a 5th side so I could just use the basic stove, but it only adds like .2 of an ounce so whatever.
Using it:
The thing I was most excited about with this stove is the fact that it has a mesh grate on the bottom. Theoretically this would make it easier to light because you can get at your tinder from the bottom. I have to say that this feature FAR surpassed my expectations. It is so ridiculously easy to get a fire going in this thing. It takes off like a rocket compared to my BushBuddy and Ti-Tri/inferno.
I think the tinder just has a lot more air available to it due to the open bottom design of the stove. For instance, in the BushBuddy when lighting tinder, if everything wasn't extremely dry I would often have tinder burning on one side and then have to work it over to the other side to get everything going and it was very precarious and a hassle. In the FireFly, all the tinder ignites very quickly, and burns much more intensely so it gets the kindling going faster too. Starting fires just feels much more "secure" - there isn't as much fiddling, huffing and puffing required because the fire can grab so much air, and all that air is feeding it from the bottom. It's a bit hard to describe but it just feels completely different from the other 2 woodburners I have used. I'm sure this is not unique to the FireFly and there are other stoves that are this easy to light, but compared to my BushBuddy and Ti-Tri it's an amazing difference.
With the BushBuddy I found the top-down burn technique to be the easiest because it was so hard and annoying to light tinder in the bottom of the stove. With the FireFly, though, I can just turn it on its side and easily light the tinder with a lighter. I found I could throw some wood shavings in the stove, light them, throw a few twigs in haphazardly, and immediately put the pot on while continuing to feed twigs through the top. With so much air available through the bottom grate, there is really no way to smother to flame this way. With the BushBuddy I need to wait several minutes for the flame to establish itself and start burning down before putting the pot on.
I know everyone loves the top-down method, but I find it to just not be very effective unless you have dry wood and excellent tinder. For 3 season hiking in New England, this is often not the case...
Boil with one load?
One thing I was hoping I'd be able to do with this stove is load it up once with wood, light it, and set it off to the side and have it boil 2 cups with no further feeding. The idea being that I'm at a shelter or something and it's raining, and I want to use wood. I want to be able to put the stove out in the rain, far away from people so the smoke won't bother them, and have it boil without me needing to sit there and feed it twigs.
I tried twice and was moderately successful. I put some wood shavings in the bottom and loaded it up with sticks as tightly as I could, lit the shavings, immediately put the pot on, and walked away. As expected this produced a ridiculous amount of smoke, but thanks to the grate on the bottom providing tons of air it didn't get smothered and go out like would happen if I tried this with my BushBuddy.
I was able to get weak boils both times I tried it in 30* temps with some wind and semi-rotten wood. No rolling boil, but it easily got the water hot enough that I could have cooked up a pasta side. I imagine I'll get better at loading the stove with more practice - I was kind of throwing sticks in wherever I could fit them. Can probably fit more if I turn the stove on its side and stack the pieces in vertically like that. Or I could just walk out and add a few twigs when it's halfway through burning.
It took around 6-7 minutes to get that weak boil after I lit it. It takes longer from start to finish this way since you need to carefully load the stove, but this technique could be useful from time to time.
Alcohol?
I decided against the multi-fuel option on my stove. Basically the multifuel option is just a couple little wires attached to support a wind screen, and an aluminum stand to raise the height of the alcohol/esbit burner.
I was aiming to be able to cook meals with 1/2 an ounce of alcohol. I figured this would require either the windscreen or a reflectix cozy. Since I wanted a cozy anyways to protect everything from soot on the pot, it seemed an easy choice to ditch the wind screen. This seems to have been a good decision.
I'm getting wimpy almost-boils with 1/2 an ounce of alcohol in a 12-10 trail designs burner, 25* temperatures on my back porch. I made my own little burner support to bring the burner closer to the pot. I will have to experiment more with other types of alcohol burner, as the trail designs one may not be the best choice here.
One trick for cooking with less fuel is to use less water. With less water to heat, the water you have will get hotter. You can also put your food into the water before putting it on the heat, which gives it more time to cook. I cooked up a pasta side this way. About 2 minutes in the magical reflectix cozy afterwards and it was perfectly done.
Conclusion
I'm very happy with this stove. I can only think of two possible improvements: It would be nice if it had hinges, although maybe not because that would add more weight. If a very minimal hinge design could be used and the weight kept under 3oz, it would probably be worth it I think. However I'm not sure if that's possible... I think it could also get away with using thinner titanium. My Ti-Tri seems to use a thinner material and does just fine burning wood. I don't know much about the properties of titanium, though, so I could be wrong there too.
The two main reasons I was interested in it were the low weight (one of the lightest wood stoves available) and the mesh bottom. It surpassed my expectations here and I already appreciate how much easier it makes bottom lighting.
...Anybody want to buy a BushBuddy?