“From what i’ve seen once you get the stove.. fancy cone screens, pot stand.. then fuel you are not saving very much anyway. im not waiting around for 10mins for water to boil after hiking all day.
Plus, i did the entire long trail on one 4oz canister (8oz total weight) with left over at the end. that would have been 19oz of alcohol if i measured perfect every time. And i had the option to do hot chocolate to below boiling without much extra fuel use.”
Let’s see, a commercial stove you can get easily, say the
zelph starlight, or any comparable efficiency stove, uses by weight about 12 gm alcohol per 2 cup boil. For a 3 minute fast canister boil of actual 2 cups (amount matters, obviously) I think it’s about 9 grams, adjust amounts to fit actual amount boiled, it’s linear. Boil time for that type of stove is I think around 6-7 minutes.
100 gm gas will give I think at best efficiency about 2x more boil than 100gm alcohol fuel, that’s going to be slower than 3 minutes I believe though, jetboil will be a bit better, not sure how much, but it’s heavy and clunky.
There’s clearly something seriously wrong with the system you used. 19 ouunce liquid of alcohol weighs about 15oz plus 1 oz for container. 15 oz is about 450 grams. A decent alcohol setup is easy to use, uses about 12 gm (15ml, 1/2 oz liquid) per 2 cups. So you’re talking about something that required about 4x the amount of fuel per boil, which is so radically out of the range of what is easy to achieve now that it would be interesting to see what on earth you did to manage to get that bad efficiency.
A good stove is also easy to fill and light, so you can put as much or as little fuel in it as you want, for those cocoa cups etc.
It would be useful to note exactly what you did and used when suggesting that such awful performance is normal for alcohol. Even the less efficient stuff like a fancy feast stove only needs about 20ml to boil 2 cups, and since you were getting far worse than that, one has to wonder if you were trying to boil water without a wind screen in the wind, that’s the only way I’ve everf gotten super bad efficiencies like that.
Clearly alcohol isn’t for everyone, and I think the stove makers have kind of hurt the alcohol stove area by not linking the stoves to screens as one unit, the screen really matters, that’s why people like those cone things, but you really don’t need a cone to get good performance, it’s just that the cone makers make the cone fit the pot, which is the real trick I have found.
It’s very likely as well that comparisons are not apples to apples, for example, I’d be curious about the claim of 100 gm lasting 2 weeks, that suggests one boil of less than 2 cups a day, unless it’s jetboil, but you’ll never actually carry more weight with a good alcohol system, though if you compare good canister to terrible alcohol of course you can make the numbers say whatever you want.
Not to pull this off topci, but there seems to be a real glitch in info and use for some people with alcohol.
As to carrying alcohol, it’s in a plastic bottle, I carry mine in an outside pocket, as noted, in a zip lock, this isn’t exactly rocket science, it’s a liquid, you treat it like any other liquid around your pack. I also don’t carry olive oil inside my pack, for the same reasons. You’ll get more accurate fuel use if you use a measuring cup I find, and that’s not exactly hard to do. But I think a lot of the blame for issues people have with alcohol stoves comes from really bad old designs, and not treating the stove/screen as one system, or having to carry oddly shaped cones, when that just isn’t at all necessary to get those efficiencies and performance.
