My stove arrived just over a month ago (got in on the first pre-pre-order wave) and although it has its downsides, it is a pretty impressive unit.
Downsides: Not quite as easy (or clean) as your basic portable butane camping stove.
You can't just 'turn it on', then 'turn it off'. It's more of a 'do a few minutes of prep' to start it and then wait a few more minutes for the embers to form a good base. Once it's up and running it hums along quite nicely. You only have to put a few "BioLite sized" bits of wood in every 5 minutes or so.
When you're all finished with it, you need to turn the fan off. Most times the fan will restart automatically to prevent the side unit from over-heating. I'm pretty sure it turns off when it is safe to do so. After that, you can either wait for the remaining embers to burn down, or you can dig a hole, chuck the embers in, and then cover it with water then back over with dirt.
Upsides: It uses remarkably little firewood considering the heat it puts out.
The USB charging function seems to work well, but I have noticed when the heat goes down in the fire chamber (i.e. down to nearly embers/coals burning in the bottom) the light that tells you the USB is able to charge stuff goes off (actually from green=good to go, to orange=not ready).
When you have a pot on top, it feels relatively stable.
I've just copy and pasted the above text in to this original thread I started for the purpose of unlocking the thread.
Yeah, I took the side unit off the other day and noticed it had stock standard philips screwdriver heads, but I managed to resist as well. I get the feeling there will be something inside that won't go back together if I tried. ;)
stevenz: Wouldn't it just be a heat exchanger unit like a peltier or similar?
Agree, pretty sure it will just be a peltier, perhaps with a cleverly designed cold side to make it space efficient (or perhaps it's just low power, anybody done a test to see what sort of power it's generating under load?)
Not uncommon for people to DIY build this type of power generation to run off campfires and the like.
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