KELLY KETTLE

(Debt has been updated with my latest grocery deals.)

SUPER excited to share the latest addition to our preps: the Kelly Kettle !!

Just YouTube the name and you'll get a ton of videos showing it in action. We made a video as well: http://youtu.be/Asq4ZVibht4 . We didn't spend a lot of time describing how it works et cetera, there are many other videos which do better than we could.

What we ARE excited about, is the reality that our prepping life can become so much easier. Being able to have clean, purified and hot water using very little energy is phenomenal. It means we can move to lighter, freeze dried or dehydrated foods for our preps, which not only simplifies but literally also lightens the load.

I was first introduced to the Kelly Kettle through a group of prepper folks I "met" living in the U.K. (that's England to us Americans.) They kept talking about this thing called a Kelly Kettle so they could have hot tea and soup when they bugged out. When I investigated further, I knew I had to have one.

A Kelly Kettle primarily does one thing well: heat liquids fast, and do it using a minimal amount of biomass (wood, leaves, pine cones, animal dung). Ours boiled a 1/2 gallon of water in 3 minutes, 8 seconds. Experiments have been done using other forms of fuel, such as alcohol burners, hexamine tablets, charcoal. 

Can you cook on it? Yes, but think re-heat rather than cooking a full course meal, it's not a dutch oven after all.

Kelly Kettles come in two materials: aluminum and stainless steel. Since we bought the Base Camp model, we chose SS for durability. In the U.S., the price point between SS and Aluminum is like $10 (it's a bigger gap in Canada and Europe.) I hope someday to get the Trekker versions for each BOB. It boils two cups which equates well to those Mountain House type freeze dried backpack meals. If I was buying Trekker size, I might be tempted to go aluminum.

Really looking forward to getting a lot of use out of this. We need to invest in a better piece of steel for our flint and steel fire-starting. The piece we have puts out sparks omni directional. You really want one which puts a spark straight out. Royston Upton did a great YT video on this subject: http://youtu.be/7C1u9u_kAmc

Bit by bit, row by row, that's how we make our prepping grow !