Top pick

The simple form and stainless steel finish may be exactly the minimalist effect you want—or it may look more like a dryer drum to you. But the light weight of the Bonfire 2.0 makes it a pit that you can drag out to use and then hide away when it cools off.

Get this if: You want a fire pit that’s small and light enough to move easily from storage (say, in a garage or under a cover) onto a patio. If you buy the add-on stand, you can even use it on a deck.

It’s easy to use, easy to store, and easy to move around. Like all the fire pits we tested, the Solo Stove Bonfire 2.0 is easy to load with wood and easy to light—though due to the pit diameter (at 17.5 inches, it’s smaller than our other picks), you have to stack standard-size logs carefully to make them fit. It is half the weight of any of our other picks, which makes it very portable.

It’s almost smokeless. None of the pits we tested are truly smokeless, including this one. However, once it gets burning, the Bonfire does eat up a lot of the extra smoke; by our admittedly rudimentary estimation, the fire pit reduces smoke by about 70% to 80%. (We compared a fire in the Bonfire with an open wood fire by burning them side by side, using wood from the same source.)

It comes in several sizes and configurations. Solo Stove offers a smaller size (the Ranger 2.0, which is 15 inches in diameter) and a larger size (the Yukon 2.0, which is 27 inches in diameter) and sells a grill grate accessory kit (we haven’t tested it yet). The current (2.0) models of the Bonfire, Ranger, and Yukon come with a removable ash pan and grate.

This updated design fixed the one obvious flaw of earlier models—you had to turn the stove over to dump out the ash—so the entire unit is much easier to clean and hose down after a fire. One nice thing about all smokeless fire pits: They leave behind very little ash compared with a regular fire. Still, some cleanup is required.

If you’re worried about sparks, there’s an accessory for that too. One of our testers lives in a high fire-risk area in Southern California—where flying embers are not ideal—so she also tested the Solo Stove Bonfire Shield, a stainless steel two-piece spark screen that sits on the rim of the fire pit. It’s not a cheap accessory: around $160 for the Bonfire size (medium). But like the fire pit, it’s well made, and she found it nice to have a spark screen that fits just right. It comes with two tools that help you remove the lid to add more wood while the fire is going. (You can easily store it upside down inside the fire pit when neither are in use.)

Flaws but not dealbreakers

• One perhaps unforeseen consequence of the smoke-reducing after-burn effect from all smokeless fire pit designs: All of that gas redirection seems to project the heat of the fire straight into the air, cutting down on a lot of the radiant heat you might expect to feel when sitting near a regular fire pit. To mitigate this, Solo offers a heat deflector for each model, which redirects the heat of the stove back to everyone sitting around the fire.
• As with any fire pit, a Solo Stove model should not be left out in the rain without a cover; the rain will mix with the ash and form corrosive agents. Solo Stove makes a fabric cover and a metal cover, though a metal lid from a 20-gallon trash can also does the trick.

Specs

• Weight: 23.3 pounds
• Pit opening: 17.5 inches
• Height: 14 inches
• Material: grade 304 stainless steel
• Warranty: limited lifetime