Companion Butane Camping Stove Review

There are dozens of these lightweight camping stoves out there that all seem identical apart from the brand and paintwork. I have two: one for the boat and another for the car.

This Companion version is well-made and only cost me around $Au 20.00 . It uses standard butane canisters and has inbuilt piezo ignition. The burner is fairly powerful and is the equivalent of the main burner on a household gas stove.

The safety systems are pretty foolproof as you need to lock the butane canister in place before lighting the burner and to put the stove away, you need to invert the pot holder which creates a safety lock preventing leakage. It would however be helpful to have some way of sheltering the stove for windy locations but you’ll just need to be a bit inventive to get around this problem.

We used one of these stoves during a three week trip in Tasmania recently. The stove was light enough to carry in our baggage and we had little difficulty finding butane canisters as we moved around.  A bonus feature we discovered was that the plastic case could be used as a shallow sink to wash our dishes.