Imagine a long, dank pre-dawn to post-dusk day of crawling up an exposed mountainside, trudging through snow and slop, and battling relentless horizontal sleet and snow head-on. If you still have your wits about you by the end of the journey, all you'll want to do is replenish the thousands upon thousands of calories lost on the path behind you. But that same fierce wind and precip keep snuffing the flame on your backpacking stove. A hungry night of tossing and turning awaits.
Now imagine you're using the all-new Primus Ulti Stove system. Instead of a flitting blue flame, it puts a glowing bed of concentrated infrared heat to your pot base and works like a US mail carrier – snow, rain or gloom of night. Wind, too – especially wind. A full belly and restful night await, leaving you reenergized to press onward in the morning (hopefully under clearer skies).
In short, the Ulti makes impossible meals possible, teases Primus.
In fact, Primus straight-out declares the robust but lightweight Ulti the most wind-resistant, powerful cooking solution it's ever made. That's quite a statement from a company that's been around for over 130 years, supplying legendary worldly explorers like Roald Amundsen and Sir Edmund Hillary.
Primus announced the Ulti Stove System in July 2023, when it was hot off an ISPO Award win at the ISPO Outdoor show that year. The Swedish gear maker was readying it for a Spring 2024 launch at the time, but as we learned when we tried to cover it back then, the development ran into delays along the way and it ultimately took a few more months to get to market, debuting this past November in North America. It remains as intriguing now as it did in June 2023, though.
Our first thought when we saw a photo of the Ulti was that it looked like a Primus-badged Jetboil, an all-in-one stove/pot cooking solution designed to pack small and save time and weight. Thing is, Primus already has several Jet Boil-style cooking systems in the form of its Lite Plus and Lite XL product line. So what exactly is it that made the Ulti Stove worthy of an ISPO Award?
While the Ulti does in fact comprise a set of components sized around streamlined packing much like a Jetboil, what really sets it apart is one component in particular: its 10,000-BTU (3,000-W) burner. Unlike the typical backpacking canister stove that heats via an open flame – often heavily protected by a windscreen of some sort, but an open flame, nonetheless – the Ulti uses a catalytic combustion process that produces infrared radiation without a flame rising out of the burner body. No flame, no wind blowing the flame out.
"By mixing fuel and air inside the burner and using a powerful catalyst, this system supercharges the process," Primus explains. "The catalyst - a specialized metal alloy - dramatically reduces the energy needed for heating. This results in faster, more efficient and complete fuel burn. More heat, less waste."
That should conserve some precious fuel while cooking in frigid temperatures, and Primus says the Ulti stove will burn brightly through all kinds of weather. It complements the catalytic burner with a pressure regulator that ensures steady, efficient burning regardless of altitude or weather and a connector hose that allows the user to flip the fuel canister upside down for better performance in cold temperatures. Altitude and cold often go hand in hand with wind, and the Ulti is designed to deliver steady cooking heat through it all.
The Ulti also has large components and controls that can be used with gloves on, so there's no need to fumble around or expose your skin to frigid cold.
Infrared stoves aren't a new concept, but they remain a tiny part of the portable outdoor camping/backpacking stove market. And Primus seems to have optimized the Ulti design in a way that stands above the average infrared stove, which might be overkill for a balmy mid-summer camping trip but could prove absolutely vital on an Arctic expedition or multi-night ski mountaineering journey. And a brand as long-established as Primus touting the system as its most wind-resistant and powerful ever should elevate some eyebrows.
The Ulti's streamlined packable design may not be its main attribute, but it's definitely an attribute. With its hosed fuel connection, the system doesn't stack vertically together for use as neatly as the Primus Lite or Jetboil stoves, but the Ulti pot's heat exchanger sits low and stable atop the burner when in use.
When it's go time, the burner legs fold up to hold the hose to the base, and the whole thing drops inside the pot with the fuel canister. The pot handle flips over and locks the package in place, and Primus goes so far as to say it all fits so snugly as to eliminate unwanted rattling in your pack.
The Ulti stove takes an estimated 3.5 minutes to boil a liter of water. The system with 1-L anodized aluminum pot is designed to serve one or two people per use and weighs 1.3 lb (600g), not including fuel, while the 1.7-L version feeds two to three and weighs 1.5 lb (690 g).
The Ulti system is available from several US outdoor retailers for an MSRP of $280 for the 1.0 liter and $300 for the 1.7 liter. It's also available in Europe.
Source: Primus
