At a glace
The Good: All in one system, powerful and quick to boil water.
The Bad: Limited culinary choices, floppy handle.

Features: The stove comes with Jetboil’s one-litre FluxRing cooking cup with insulating cozy and a colour-change heat indicator. The cozy also features a flexible handle. It has a drink-through lid with pour spout and strainer. It is started with a push-button igniter and it has a 250ml measuring cup/bowl and a stabiliser that fits beneath the gas cartridge. All components, including the gas cartridge, stack inside the cooking cup when not in use.

Power: The stove has an output of 9000 BTU – a huge improvement on the original Flash’s 4500 BTU. At full throttle, it sounds like a rocket engine and when water is at a rolling boil, the stove shakes.
The compromise for having a fast-to-boil stove is that it burns through gas more quickly than less-powerful cookers, but even so, the Flash 2.0 can boil 10-litres of water with one 100g canister. That’s enough for hot meals and coffees on a multi-day trip. 

In use: The push-button ignition proved reliable and makes lighting the stove super easy – it’s done with the cooking cup already secured to the burner, which makes it easier to use than personal cookers that don’t have this feature. The claimed boil time for 500ml of water is 100 seconds. We got it boiling in as quick as 80 seconds using tap water. A test with water left in the fridge came in at 84 seconds and very cold – icy – water came in at 118 seconds. Nearly frozen water boiled in 3min08 seconds. (All boil tests were conducted at sea level and on warm days with little to no breeze.)

I found the strainer lid easy to get on and off – important when dealing with hot liquids. It also provided accurate pouring. The measuring cup/bowl is too small to use for food, but it is suitable for hot drinks. The heat indicator on the insulating cozy glows bright orange to indicate it is hot. A couple of minutes after boiling I could hold the cup by the cozy, but not comfortably. The handle did a good job of protecting hands, but it is not stiff enough to confidently twist the hot cup off the burner.

The pot supports give the tower-like cooker enough stability to prevent it toppling over.

Value: Features like push-button ignition, heat indicator and the fact it comes with its own pot makes it convenient as well as efficient. But in comparison to regular gas stoves it is expensive and the types of food it can cook is limited – think hot beverages and dehydrated food.

Verdict: It’s the fastest-boiling stove around, making it super efficient and convenient. If you’re not a fussy eater and need a quick-boiling stove, it’s hard to fault.