Fire-Starting Supplies for Your 72-Hour Kit

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No 72-hour kit is complete without fire-starting supplies. In an emergency, you might need fire to cook food, boil water, stay warm, dry off, or just provide some light!

Now, we’re not going to cover bushcraft fire-making skills in this post, but we are going to show you several fire starters that will set you up for success in an emergency.

We like to include at least two fire starters in our 72-hour kits. Redundancy is sometimes a good thing, as long as you’re not adding too much weight to your pack.

Fire requires four things — tinder, sparks, oxygen, and fuel (wood). You only need to worry about tinder and sparks for your 72-hour kit. You’re obviously not going to carry around armfuls of wood to start a fire in an emergency.

Tinder for Your 72-Hour Kit

When starting a fire, you need to start small. This is where tinder comes in. It can be anything from cotton and small twigs to petroleum jelly. You need to carry some sort of tinder in your 72-hour kit because it might be difficult to collect something useable while evacuating.

You can make your own tinder or buy tinder products. The important thing is to include something in your 72-hour kit that will ignite easily.

Tinder products and fire starters have seen some VERY cool innovations over the years.

Here are some inexpensive tinder products you can get on Amazon:

One company that makes some cool products to start a fire is Live Fire Gear. They sell a small tin that contains a waxed substance on the inside. All you do is scrape away some of the wax and ignite the substance with some sparks. It burns at an intense temperature and makes it easy to get any fire going. When you’re done using the flames, you simply slide the lid of the tin over to suffocate the flames. It can be used several times. Live Fire Gear also sells a flammable paracord where the strings on the inside are flammable.

Fire Starters for Your 72-Hour Kit

Starting a fire without matches or a lighter is very difficult. It is not a skill you’d want to learn during an emergency.

A well-rounded fire-starting kit includes both tinder and some form of lighter. At the most basic level, you need water-proof matches or a BIC lighter.

You could also include a ferro rod or a double-arc plasma lighter. We have the Swiss Safe 5-1 Fire Starter in our 72-hour kit.

When most people think of starting a fire, flint and steel come to mind. However, ferro rods and magnesium are much better. Lots of people mistake ferro rods for flint and steel, but they are not the same thing. Flint and steel is much harder to use. However, they do work in a similar fashion (striking two hard surfaces together). The difference is a ferro rod creates hotter sparks in a larger quantity. This makes it much easier to start a fire.

Here are some cool fire starters from Amazon:

In addition to a couple of firestarters and tinder, it’s good to have an inexpensive camp stove and a pot in your 72-hour kit. You can use it to cook food or disinfect water. To learn more, check out our post on Outdoor Cooking Equipment for Your 72-Hour Kit.