I have had an outdoors itch that I needed to scratch for a while, and that was to experiment to see if I could power a Kelly Kettle with dried horse poo to give me a brew. I collected some frozen horse droppings (probably, no certainly to the disgust of my family) and in the accompanying Youtube video that I did I couldn't recall how long the poop had been drying...I guessed at a year, it was actually three!
As I did the video I pretended to eat a piece of the poop on the pretence of seeing it mentioned as a possible survival food on the internet! I declare that is wasn't so at the end...
I don't know what the dried weight of the 'fuel' was but I had around a dozen of the 'biquette' style fewmets (when likened to Deer scat) and initially I tried lighting them with a single match. They scorched the droppings but didn't quite take.
I then introduced a piece of waxed card firelighter which will of course have added a little additional heat but I wasn't being too scientific, just curious with the fuel source, this had the desired effect.
With only a small amount of water to heat the efficient Kelly Kettle had me some boiling water within 2-3 minutes-Success. I probably won't be rushing out to collect more poo but I'm glad I did this little test.
Having had a post experimental internet hunt I found this bbc link regarding the burning of horse poo. And if you are interested the video is below.
