Mini Review of Esbit stove
The Esbit stove is a fairly small and light camping/survival stove that runs off solid fuel tablets. I bought it as a backup stove for a long trip where a failure of my main stove, a MSR Whisperlite International could be a problem.
In general, the Esbit stove works as expected which is not as good as advertised but much better than nothing. The stove's packaging says that each tablet burns for 12-14 minutes and that one tablet can bring a pint of water to boil in <8 minutes. I found that in both times when I used the stove, it took about 2.5 tablets to boil about 1 pint of water. I didn't carefuly measure the time it took to boil or how long each tablet burned for but it seemed to take longer than 8 minutes to bring the water to boil. I did not have a windscreen when performing these tests.
The directions stamped into the stove show it using one tablet but the stove seems to work best when two tablets are turned on their sides and used simultaneously. Since the flame's heat melts the solid fuel then vaporizes it and the vapor is what burns, this makes sense.
The overall construction of the stove looks good. The edges are kind of sharp and could use some filing but that is a minor issue. It is simple, light and appears to be rugged. Several fuel tabs fit nicely inside the stove. The whole stove, many extra fuel tablets and a lighter fit nicely into the inside of my Snowpeak mini-solo pot.
So in general, I would say that the Esbit stove makes a convient lightweight stove for short trips and a very good backup stove for longer trips.