Canister stove with best fuel consumption?

I guess you mean lowest fuel consumption.

Rather than fooling around with different butane burners, I bet you could get the most efficiency out of: 1) making sure that the pot matches the flame pattern, and 2) making sure that you had proper ventilation, which is a combination of good intake and well-blocked wind.

–B.G.–

There's a new Jetboil made out of Titanium.

If you compare it to a typical 3 ounce stove, windscreen, and Ti pot, the Jetboil weighs the same.

Jetboil is supposed to get a little better fuel efficiency

Just picked up a Jetboil Sol Ti. With a 100g fuel cannister, supposedly about 15 0.5 liter boils, it weighs the sames as my caldera cone system, 1 liter evernew pot, and 12 oz of alcohol. Not sure how the Jetboil rates for overall fuel efficiency

I won't get a long term test until later this summer, but it boils 0.5 liters of room temp water in 2 minutes vs. the 10 minutes with the Caldera cone.

I am not sure which cannister stove is the most fuel efficient, though Jetboil, the primus equivalent, and the MSR reactor are all supposed to be pretty stingy with fuel.

If it plays this well in the field it will become a standard in my kit.If it plays this well in the field it will become a standard in my kit.

BG wrote, "I guess you mean lowest fuel consumption."

Yes. Most canister stoves are blowtorches. I use a Coleman F1, which cranks out 16000+ BTU. Of course, I don't need to run it full blast. I'm sure there is an efficiency curve, but it would take some lab instrumentation to get the data. Coleman does give burn time specs of 50 minutes on high, 2 hours on low, which I assume is for their 220g canister. My guess is the manufacturer's specs are all over the map for accuracy and exceptions.

Your point on pot size is a good one. I use an MSR Titan with the canister stove, which is fairly wide and captures the flame pattern well.

That's it – the Ti Jetboil Sol

$150, 8.5 ounce including 0.8 liter pot, REI says 12 liters boiled per 100g of fuel

Compare to MSR Pocket Rocket, $40, 3 ounces, 6.6 liters boiled per 100g fuel

Plus you need a pot, for example 0.9 liter Ti, 5 ounces, $44

Plus you need a windscreen, MYOG, maybe 0.5 ounce

So they weigh the same but Jetboil requires almost half as much fuel if you believe REI

That looks like a pretty good stove

"Compare to MSR Pocket Rocket, $40, 3 ounces"

That's the heavy one. The Monatauk Gnat weighs 1.65 ounces.

–B.G.–

Looks like a great stove, money aside :)

Jetboil claims the same specs for all their stoves: 12 liters boiled per 100g canister.

I have the Jetboil Sol AL and have been using it for a few months. I continue to be amazed at how far a canister can go with this stove. Most efficient stove I have ever used or seen in my many years of backpacking.

This spring, I brought a large canister that started a 7-day trip around 1/3 full and I thought I could use it up with 3 meals & drinks for 2 of us. We cached the canister (still with some fuel left) after the first night and picked it up on our way back out, used it for 2 more meals, and I still had to haul that thing out with some fuel sloshing around in it. Great stove. I am truly a convert.

Everything I read about the MSR reactor suggests it beats the jetboil, and espiecally in adverse conditions (high altitude, wind cold). I don't see how the titanium model would be an improvement in stove efficienvy.

All canister stoves combust butane/propane gas completely, therefore all canister stoves produce the same amount of heat per gram of gas combusted. The fuel consumption therefore relates to how well this heat is coupled to the pot.

The main variables here are: size of flame, size/type of pot (w/wo heat fins) and shielding from wind.
The pots with heat fins on the base do improve heat coupling and hence fuel consumption but with a significant weight penalty. The other factors are controlled to a large extent by the USER, so to talk about the fuel consumption of the "stove" can be misleading, the user has a major effect on fuel consumption (as Bob hinted).

If you compare Sol Ti with a 1.5 ounce stove, the Sol Ti weighs 1.5 ounces more, but it will make up for this with the weight of less fuel used.

There is no weight penalty between Sol Ti and a 3 ounce stove when you include pot and windscreen, just improved fuel usage.

MSR reactor weighs 19 ounces. You'll never make up for that weight penalty with less weight of fuel used.

Efficiency isn't the only thing you have to consider though. Trip duration comes into play. As a solo hiker on a 3 day trip a 100g fuel canister will be enough regardless of which stove you use. Even 2 hikers can use a 100g canister if they are conservative with their water use. So with the Jetboil you end up actually carrying more day-ozs of weight because you end up packing fuel out.

If you are taking longer trips or with more people where you would carry a different number of cans of fuel the Jet Boil can make sense. But it is not as simple as just taking the fuel consumption per boil * number of boils and comparing two stoves. The container weights and available volumes govern the wieght of your system.

Jetboil claim to boil 12 litres using 100g gas.
It takes 4521kJ to heat 12 litres by 90C
100g gas produces 4600kJ (using average LHV for butane/propane mix).
So the Jetboil heat exchanger would need to be 98% efficient!
If it was 80% efficient, the water would need to start at 27C.

Jetboil claims look like the work of an over-enthusiastic marketing person.

Stuart wrote, "All canister stoves combust butane/propane gas completely, therefore all canister stoves produce the same amount of heat per gram of gas combusted."

I wouldn't assume that all stoves combust the fuel completely, evidenced by the variations in CO emissions. The temperature/density of the fuel as it approaches the burner will make a difference in the flame temperature and efficiency. That is probably why some stoves work better at altitude. Note the varying designs for remote canister stoves that deliver liquid fuel to the burner head and run it through a pre-heat tube for improved cold weather operation.

There is a huge variation in burner size and flame pattern, which has to make some differences. The variation in pot diameter/height makes for some confounding variables. Throw in the variations in fuel mixtures and you have a wide range of variables to account for.

Dale

A few hundred ppm of CO is not good for your health but will make no measurable difference to heat output. The size of the jet and mixer tube ensures a fairly constant air/fuel ratio over a range of conditions, liquid feed stoves are no different from the jet downstream.
Burner size doesn't vary that much, flame size does but that's under your control. Pot size is under your control, except for stoves with an 'integrated' pot.
The difference in net calorific value between propane and butane is ~1%, simply not significant.

Interestingly, a Jetboil was measured by BPL for the heat exchangers stove article as using 8.5g to boil a liter of water. 12×8.5=102. Pretty close to the claimed numbers, and significantly better than the best non-heat exchanger stove (SOTO at 10.7).
I also notice that of the various non-heat exchanger stoves tested, g/l varied from 10.7 to 15.3 – so clearly there is siginificant variation in fuel efficiency from one stove to the next.

one thing ill note about my jetboil … is that it works pretty well on canisters that are fairly spent … gets all that extra bit of fuel to use

ive had it works smoothly when other's snow peaks and other stoves sputtered

i believe one or two others on BPL have experienced this as well

this bum wouldnt use it if it doesnt work … he only solos 8000m himalayan peaks in a day and runs up the eiger in less than 3 hours …

I agree with Eric that my jetboil uses virtually ALL the fuel in the canister. When it quits, I can shake the canister and hear nothing inside. I bought one of the Crunch-It tools jetboil makes for evacuating & puncturing the canisters so they can be easily recycled and the 3 or 4 canisters I've used it on (that were spent on the jetboil) have had hardly a thing come out of them when I release the pressure before puncturing.

Can't speak too much about how this works with other brands though. I don't recall this being a significant issue with my MSR Pocket Rocket, but then again, I didn't have a tool for evacuating & puncturing back then.

Paul
In the BPL article, the Jetboil GCS used 8.5g to raise 1 litre of water by 80C. Sure as h3ll my water does not start at 20C! All the same, these figures would indicate that the efficiency of the heat exchanger is 86%, which is impressive.

In the non-heat exchanger stoves, you quote fuel use of 10.7 to 15.3, but that is comparing one stove on a low setting vs another stove on a high setting. If all stoves on a low setting are compared, the range is 10.7 to 12.7 g/l/80C. All stoves use more fuel on a high setting vs the same stove on a low setting (apart from the MSR PR when the gas has obviously run out).
However, I'll grant you that the data does not show an overall inverse relationship between boil time and fuel used that I would expect.

Dale – read the test report for your answer
http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/canister_stove_efficiency_p2.html