If you camp out regularly as we do there is nothing like sitting round a campfire having a beer, a good yarn, cremating marshmallows and ensuring your kids don’t get to close and go up in flames.

I’ve had a few fire pits in my time, the last being one of those fold up mesh ones which for a portable fire pit is surprisingly good. The main gripe with all of them is the smoke, I don’t mind smelling like a bonfire but when the wind changes and you get an eyeful of smoke it kind of ruins the moment and you are forever shifting about the fire to stay out of it’s path.

Whilst perusing social media, adverts started coming up for the Solo Stove smokeless fire pit.

I’ve had my eye on one for a while and this Easter which tied in with my birthday I decided to treat myself and find out if the hype about being smokeless is for real. The advertising campaign is very slick and features happy people without smoke in their eyes sitting around the fire pit having a very nice time.

I read a good number of reviews and all sung the praises of this amazing fire pit, I bought the Ranger 2.0 which for a limited time came with a Mesa table top fire pit.

It arrived and I tested it on two separate occasions.

It was always going to smoke when you first light it and this is stated in the manual, they advise using hardwood and I used well seasoned Oak which is about as hard a wood as you can get, not massive logs either, split logs as recommended.

If like in the picture you have flames coming out the top of the fire pit it is indeed mostly smokeless although you still get invisible smoke in the eye quite a lot, being invisible makes it harder to dodge, as the fire burns down the visible smoke returns and as oak is a slow burning low flame wood there was a lot of smoke again fairly quickly, what I think you need is wood that has a high flame output and a lot of it as you’ll be going through it pretty fast.

Never did I see flames like this which is a picture from their campaign.

It does generate a decent amount of heat in all directions which is a great improvement over traditional fire pits and as the flames are mostly contained there is a lot less chance of setting you or something else on fire

You’ll also note from my first picture of the stove that it is sitting on bricks as it doesn’t come with a stand to keep it off the ground, that’s another £49.99 in addition to the £184.99 the fire pit cost, it’s my opinion for that kind of money the stand should be included or if you are going to throw in a free item, a stand for the fire pit instead of an additional tabletop fire pit would be more suitable.

Cleaning wise there is an ash pan that catches most of the ash but you’ll still need to turn the whole thing upside down to get rid of the rest of it.

If you are not satisfied there is a money back guarantee.

For now I’m going to hold on to it, maybe I have a bit more to learn about it so I’ll have a few more fires with different fuel and see how I get on, if it was down to Lolly she wouldn’t have bought it in the first place.

In summary the unit is very well built and with proper care should last a lifetime, however getting the fire to burn at it’s optimum rate for a smokeless experience takes a bit of practice and it’s price point isn’t attractive for the odd weekend aways use.