?? For Whisperlite Internat’l owners

Simmering is always difficult with white gas. I rarely succeeded.

Cheers

It kind of depends on what is the intention of simmering.

Sometimes you want a simmer just to conserve fuel while maintaining a small flame. Sometimes you want just low heat to carefully bake bread. It also depends on the pot volume that you are trying to deal with.

–B.G.–

Simmering is tricky. Only because it means so many different things to different people. It is not well defined.

I define it as a stove that will *just* burp 1L of boiled water at 60F ambient in a "square"(height=diameter) 18ga aluminum pot no insulation. Oh yeah, a top, too. A very, very slow boil. The SVEA will do this, barely. It is hot enough to call it a medium heat on an alcohol stove. Canisters are different. It is possible to turn them too low. I measured mine at 205F after 1 hour(no change after 15 minutes at 69F ambient.) You need to be aware of the differences, since temperature/cooking is mostly about chemistry. Example: low and slow is better for rehydrating than high and fast.

Read the current articles by Ryan Jordan. While he does not say this, he does show in his tables that ambient temps have a lot to do with boiling water. Heat escape (from pots, using a lid, wind-screens, etc) seems to be a fairly important part of heating a pot. He mentions insulated heat screens, etc.

As always, the heat retention(through IR and insulation) of a system is as important as the raw heat added to a system. If none were to escape, you could boil water at near 100% efficiency. If you include condensation from the superheated byproducts of combustion, you could easily exceede the nominal 100% for combustion, alone. Of course, we never get that while camping. It becomes a matter of trade offs between weight, volume, heat production, and heat retention.

"Simmering" becomes one of those lazy terms, since the meanings can change. Some manufacturors think that cutting heat production from a nominal 10000BTU to 5000BTU is simmering. (That is still more than the SVEA puts out on HIGH.) A simmer ring on a 12/10 stove will give you a 30minute boil (actually uses more fuel) but simmers at about 500BTU.

Anyway, most stoves that rely on a pump will not meet my definition of simmering. I say "most" only because I have not tried every one on the market. The average range for alcohol stoves is between 300-1500BTU. The average range for Canister stoves is ~200-9000BTU. The average range for WG is 2000-1000BTU. There are some that may go higher or lower, of course. My burners on my home stove is 12000BTU/9000BTU.

Anyway, the Whisperlite/Simmerlite are very similar. Neither simmer at any stable temp.

Yes, it can be turned low enough to bake. However, it will not maintain that flame level very long. It will likely drop, requiring you to adjust. The problem is that when you turn the knob the flame doesn't change right then. It takes a moment, an by the time it changes it may require another change. You would likely have to constantly adjust the stove while trying to bake. I find it MUCH easier on a canister stove!

Christmas Eve, I used my SP Gigapower stove to simmer dinner for about 15 minutes. I had earlier this month, made an aluminum flashing windscreen for it so it would be more efficient. I monitored the thermal feedback to the canister (2/3 empty) and only noticed the top of the canister warming with the fuel level still cool. I could still easily touch the top. I was still surprised at the feedback. I still need to tweek how it is held in place as I was only using a couple bits of wire to suspend the ws off of the pot supports. The thermal feedback kept the fuel vaporised.
Duane

what air temperature?

> what air temperature?
I find the ambient temperature to be less important. But I cook in my tent, I use a good windscreen coming up at least 1/2 way to the top of the pot, I have the windscreen 10 – 20 mm from the pot, and I use a good lid. Under these conditions the pot does not really get to see 'ambient' at all. Yeah, turn the stove off and ambient starts to creep in.

Cheers

James, very informative reply, thank you. Do you have a way of estimating BTUs?

Winter temp conditions. It was in the upper 20F's at the time I think, as I was watching my dinner and watching ice form on a nearby snow melt puddle. I'll have to make some mods to the ws as I could have made it a little taller and made a cutout for the pot handles or remove them and bring a light pot gripper from my Optimus 99. First attempt, at least I got off my butt and made something. Not that I use canister stoves much with so many gas and kero stoves in my arsenal. Here's a out of focus shot.
Duane