Hot water anyone?

Slowly but surely I'm checking things off of my gear list for the summer. I have many of the camping things I will need like a tent and sleeping bag but there are a lot of little odds and ends I still need. Hopefully I can keep track of everything without losing them before I leave. I have a tendency to misplace things frequently.

Sunday night I had a cookout with my friend Ben. We were partly testing stoves to find the best one for this trip and partly just testing stoves because it's fun. Who doesn't like boiling water? We had a number of stove and pot combination's to choose from. I think the decision now is between the Esbit and the Vargo Decagon. The Esbit uses little solid fuel tablets that burn for about 12 mins and the Vargo burns alcohol. Both stoves are super simple and compact. I'm mainly looking for a stove to boil water with so these will work well for that because they just produce a constant heat until the fuel runs out. Some of the qualities we compared were compactness/weight, time required to boil 2 cups of water, accessibility of fuel, maintenance required, and stability with pot. The Vargo has the cheapest and most accessible fuel as well as no moving parts which is pretty convenient. The Esbit was more stable with the kettle pot and it also doesn't need to be primed so it boiled 2 cups of water in 8 mins compared to the 11 mins that the Vargo required. I'll probably end up using the Vargo stove because I can get fuel easily and for cheap.

The Esbit is on the left with the packaged fuel tablet and the Vargo Decagon is on the right. In the middle is the MSR Pocket Rocket. For size comparison, the Esbit folds down into a little box just larger than a deck of cards. The Pocket Rocket is small too but if requires a fuel canister that is not pictured here.