BRS-3000T fakes on eBay

The different one was only $5.69 + $2.99 shipping = $8.68 each.  Another vendor has them at $9.99 including shipping.  The $5.69 vendor, philipss999, lists it as “Brand: BRS, Type: BRS-3000T, Material: 60% Titanium alloy, 10% Copper, 20% stainless-steel.” and previously listed the weight as 25 grams (like the real one) and includes photos of his actual offering with the brass stem but also some of a real BRS-3000T, with its gray stem.  The $9.99 vendor reports a more honest 46 grams.

I ordered two, having only seen the 25-grams claim and as soon as I got them, it was clear they were twice the weight – 48 grams on my scale that shows me 23-24 grams for my BRS-3000T.  And there’s no way it is 60% Ti – most all of its weight is brass and SS and I’m not seeing any parts that seem to be titanium.  So I have a claim in with eBay.  The seller says they can’t generate a return shipping label (probably because it would cost $17) and is offering me a 70% refund.

The real BRS-3000T is on the left.  The fake is on the right.

The fake is 1/2 inch higher, the diameter of the pot supports is 1/4″ more.  The pot supports are very floppy to the point that it is tedious to get them all deployed or retracted.  Also, when the stem is screwed tight to the valve body, you can’t get one pot support up and down – you have to loosen that threaded joint to fully collapse it.

I haven’t fired them up yet, in case I do end up returning them, but I really wonder about the disparate sizes of the four holes for pre-mix air.  Half the diameter = one quarter the cross-sectional area and presumably a whole richer (more CO?) or just a smaller flame.

So mostly, I’m posting this as a warning to avoid the fake.  The real ones aren’t much money, some are available more quickly from US sellers, they aren’t so fiddly to deploy/store and I wonder about CO generation on the fake ones.

I’ll probably end up with the fakes and then I’ll fire one up and do a quick comparison of heat rates.

I think the real ones are available through Amazon (maybe at a slightly higher price), but maybe worth it to avoid the hassles.  Says this is a BRS Authorized Seller.

From that Amazon page :

good luck with that

The irony that there are fake BRS3000 stoves!

Exactly. I bought the real deal stove a few months ago off eBay, and saw tons of the copycats as well, most of them claiming that their stove is in fact the BRS-3000T, not something similar to it. The lower to-my-door price was tempting for about a minute, but the BRS is so inexpensive I figured there’s no point in trying to save a few bucks. Dave, thanks for posting these specs, I’m relieved for myself but concerned for the many others who do buy the knock-offs and then don’t get what is advertised.

So I have a claim in with eBay.  The seller says they can’t generate a return shipping label (probably because it would cost $17) and is offering me a 70% refund.

This seems strange to me, I thought that if you bought a fake advertised as real through ebay their standard procedure is to refund you and tell you to destroy the item, because if you send it back the seller can use it to scam more people, but that policy may have changed recently, or maybe I’m thinking about amazon or some other site.

“The irony that there are fake BRS3000 stoves!”

Yeah, that struck me, too.  A friend sold hand-made jewelry on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley (kind of a 40-year-long sidewalk craft fare) – mostly hand-polished semi-precious gemstones in hand-made silver and gold settings.  But the margin was just so good on cubic zirconium rings and ear studs ($0.80 CZ, $0.17 setting, pinch it together, sell it for $29/pair) and it met the minimum requirements of “hand-made” so they sold those on the side.  $29/pair was so much less than Macy’s, etc sold them for, that the sorority girls would sometimes ask, “Is this REAL cubic zirconium?” which always made her laugh.

China commonly makes knock-offs of knock-offs. Nothing unusual about it.

Misleading wording on ads and ebay too

So, the seller was to refund purchase price and shipping, only wanted to pay 70%, but not shipping, than claimed 61% was 70% (bad math pisses me off more than routine dishonesty), and eventually refunded $9 of my $17.36.

So I fired one up.  Okay, heat output seemed okay.  Flame wasn’t much different than a BRS-3000T.  I did a side-by-side thinking I’d get efficiency number to assess if the flame was over-rich, but before it had boiled a pint (500 grams), the flame got lower and quieter.  Like the canister was almost out.  But the canister had liquid in it, it was inside my garage, and a normal 60F-ish temperature to the touch.  And it kept decreasing, even as I opened the valve more and more.  And eventually went out.  Completely.  And moving the valve, in either direction, did nothing.

I went to take the stove off the canister and Wow!, the base of the stove, closest to the canister was HOT!  Like 160F.  All that brass, going up to the burner head and down close to the aluminum (?) valve body conducted heat very well.  I was unable to relight it for several minutes.

When it was completely cooled, it could be relit as before.

I theorize that dis-similar thermal expansion rates between the valve stem and the valve body caused the valve to close even when fully unscrewed.

Maybe, if I’d operated full-throttle, the pint of water would have boiled in 2 minutes (it quit completely at 4 minutes) and maybe been helped by more butane coming up through the stem, but a stove that stops before while boiling one pint of water seems pretty useless to me.

It’s going in the parts bin.

HA!  Just don’t try to reuse the valve body part :)

maybe you got $8.36 worth of entertainment out of it?  Especially if you include the entertainment of anyone reading.  (Got to be careful with my math, don’t want to offend David : )

yeah, when I saw “fake” BRS-3000 I thought, “wait a second, I thought BRS-3000 were fake, how can you have a fake fake…”

I bought a BRS-3000 from Amazon, seemed to work okay

Jerry, someone from Bangalesh might try to do a fake version of David’s goofy stove. That would be news. You know, like fake, fake, fake news. Trump would like that a lot.

Keep in mind that the BRS-3000T is merely a first generation knock-off of Fire Maple’s FMS-300T, which is an excellent stove by the way (but mine weighs 1.7 oz., vs. 0.9 for my BRS-3000T stoves).

so the fake is better than the real one (if you’re talking about weight)

fake fake is just bad

but, it must be possible to design a stove that conducts heat down to the fuel better so it works better at low temps.  Maybe what you need is a canister that conducts heat better – copper or aluminum instead of steel.  I guess Moulder strip already solves the problem so we don’t need to think about it more.