Tent Stove How-to Operate (Pro Tips) 2026

February 7, 2026

Use different firewood pieces to build the fire inside tent stove, and then control the temperature with wood sizes. Operate the air intake and damper on the firebox in the backcountry. View the campfire through the glass viewing window, so that you know when to add more firewood. Lots of helpful tips!

How to Manage a Wood Stove Inside of Your Hot Tent

Let's talk about wood first and the type of wood that you would gather be able to uh use to burn in the stove. Lot's of helpful tips from 4 decades of operating a wood stove!

Start a Wood Stove Just Like a Campfire

Just like you would do with any campfire, you're going to want to gather and initially build your fire with just small pieces of wood, and then once you get it burning really well and you've got a coal base, that's starting to build up in the the bottom of the stove, then you can start to add thicker, bigger pieces, gonna burn longer and just create a hotter burning fire.

Then you can start to add the really big pieces. But again, notice that they are short. Make sure that they don't exceed the length of the stove.

Typically, when you're out with a wood stove, you're going to be in off to the greatest of weather, and so you're likely going to have wet wood. It might be covered in snow and so you want to take advantage of the heat coming from the stove to be able to basically dry out the wood by putting the wood on the underside of the stove.

Wood Stove Air Intake and Damper Use

Now, the next thing to consider is how the air intake and the damper work together to make them the stove more efficient. So, here on the front of the stove, you have an air intake that is adjustable that basically works to allow air to be drawn into the firebox, and so you can adjust this to change the amount of air intake into the stove, which will change how fast and quickly the wood is going to burn. With the damper, what you've got here is the ability to adjust how air intake is drawn from the front of the stove and then up and out through the chimney.

Second part of the damper is to be able to basically force heat back down into the belly of the stove so that you're heating up the tent and you're not losing all of your heat and escaping up through the chimney pipe.

Preparing for Longer Burn Times

Now, the last thing to talk about is how you might prepare the stove for bedtime so that you get the most heat out of it for the longest period of time. But what you want to do, like we talked about earlier, is with your biggest pieces, don't necessarily want to put them underneath the belly of the stove. You kind of want them to be a little bit wet because this will help prolong the length of time that they burn.

You want to make sure that the stove has burned for a good period of time because you want to have really good thick coal base in the bottom of the bottom of the stove. You throw those in, you've got that good coal base. You're going to shut your door and you're going to shut your damper all the way. And that will allow these pieces to burn for a long time, create good heat inside of the tent, just be a nice cozy evening