Bio Lite BBQ Grill

[GearFreak]

While on my Kilvert Lake canoe trip this past summer my tripping companion had this attachment for the BioLite Stove.

If you are not familiar with this stove - Its essentially a stick stove that generates electricity and can charge items via a USB attachment. Now if that was not cool enough it has a BBQ attachment.

It was interesting enough that I made its own short little feature. Took a bit to come up with a name for it - and thanks to an online Thesaurus - I have a new video series I can use! I think items will fall into Useful Gear, handy gadgets, or just gimmicks (that word was too long for the title!).

Hope you enjoy.

 

[Mihun09]

In the beginning, we were on the list of people who saw the stove in the development stages and were really keen to get it. Once it came out for production it lost most of it's value for us. I paid $180 for mine after being on the wait list before it hit store shelves and that was a waste considering MEC sells them for $130. We tried it. The charging function is a gizmo really since there is limited devices that will actually charge from it and if you are on a canoe trip and "have" cell service, then it isn't where we go. On one trip I wrote up a missive about how we got it to work where you didn't need to move the pot to reload the stove as it burned down, which defeated the purpose in the first place and I sent the link to the review to BioLite which basically was a bad review of the product. Shortly there after they came out with accessories that did what we did to make the stove more readily accessible for re-fuelling. Funny how that works.

Regardless, we were disappointed with the end result and sold the stove to a fellow Manitoban through this site. He apparently loves it more than we did which works for all of us.

The Camp stove version is too big. If they had stuck with the original vision of the stove it would have worked better for us, but sales may have been less. We figure they got corporate sponsorship which forced them to add the charging function to entice more people to purchase it. The integrated fan would have been good enough for most people, but of course, we know that BioLite flooded into the storm ravaged areas after Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast and got major publicity about using debris so people could charge their iPhones during the crisis.

To me, it was a great product that fell short of the original goal and they are now adding accessories to purchase to bring it closer to the original concept.

To each their own.

Link to the review I gave it directly to the page... http://www.myccr.com/phpbbforum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=39749&hilit=BioLite&start=45

Karin

 

[GearFreak]

Hi

Thanks for posting the link - you gave a great review and really showed the items shortcomings. I had never seen one in person until this spring but was too busy to take a good look at it then. This grill attachment was obviously cool and the owner loves it.