To fire up your cooker, you will first need a can full of biomass. Best choice is pencil-sized sticks of completely dry, dead wood, most often found still attached to trees or hanging from branches. Anything which is laying on the ground is likely to be somewhat damp, hindering a clean burn. The stove will also burn charcoal, pine cones, bits of cane etc. to varying degrees of success.



Fill the can with sticks, laid parallel to the ground in alternating rows like a grid. Bring the wood to near the top burner holes, but do not cover them.



Place the cooker on something that won't ignite, and shelter it from the wind. You could carry a windscreen but unless you're traveling in particularly harsh terrain it's worth it just to find a quieter place to cook your meal.



Build and start a small fire on top of this fuel. Fire-lighting is an arcane art with many approaches, all of which call for some practice and skill. A general approach that works well is a tinder ball with a small tipi of sticks around it; the idea is to get the sticks burning and start to char the layer below, as well as to make glowing coals that drop down to ignite the lower wood.



Place the windscreen/potstand in the groove of the can; this can be used to build a lean-to style top fire as well. Experiment before it makes the difference between dinner hot and dinner cold!



If properly built and loaded, the stove will ignite the smoke from the fire readily, within a minute of ignition. When the smoke is burning cleanly and brightly, it's time to put a pot on the stand. I keep steel chopsticks on hand to stir the fire if needed, but a light hand is best here and the fire if well built will burn without interference.



When the existing wood has all become coal, one can keep the fire going by feeding sticks in one at a time. They quickly ignite and the smoke feeds the fire for awhile; the stove in this mode must be frequently but lightly fed, finding a balance between too much smoke to burn it all and not enough to keep the secondary burn going.



I keep the lid around, as a trivet for the pot, and to cover the fire when i'm done with it. This will cause the remaining charcoal to smother out slowly; leaving the lid off will led it burn down into clean ash. The can could be used for charcoal making by firing it until the volatiles are mostly gone, covering the bottom holes with dirt, and putting the lid on.



As I implied earlier, the stove as shown here doesn't work as well as it might. I chalk this up to the small holes at the bottom of the inner can; larger holes, and more of them, will feed the fire properly and keep everything nicely aglow.