Published August 10, 2008 02:24AM
Tucked back in no-man’s land in this vast convention hall, there’s a tiny little booth with a big idea. Soto is a successful Japanese stove company has supposedly solved one of canister stove’s perennial problems: cold weather/high altitude performance. We’ve always loved canister stoves because they’re tiny, light, and idiot-proof, but performance always suffers in cold weather. Soto’s stove–the working name is the Micro Regulator–has a tiny diaphram inside that regulates the pressure inside, no matter what the temp outside. Translation: no sputtering and output crash when it gets cold. It also, apparently reduces the CO2 output by half. We hope to get test samples soon, just in time for fall/winter testing. If it really works, and if they succeed in finding US distributors (if it does work, they will surely find many), you’ll be reading about it in Backpacker soon.
–Kristin Hostetter