BRS Windscreen Question

[Ronald Stokley]

Has anyone tried/reviewed the SOTO ST-310 Windscreen for the BRS 3000T stove? I’ve used the Flat Cat Gear Ocelot with reasonable results.

[Ronald Stokley]

Apparently the package the windscreen was shipped in was incorrectly labeled. I purchased the BRS Windscreen from Amazon; it has no other identifying maker’s label. Basically, it looks like a large Ti ring that fits perfectly in the slots of the pot supports.

[Roger Caffin]

At one stage I counted 13 different stoves labelled “BRS-3000T” on Amazon. 12 of them were copies, fakes and frauds and (probably) failures
Draw your own conclusions.

Cheers

[Bill Budney]

Roger: How do you distinguish fake from real?

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

Thns could help, I forgot where I got it from (I thing someone over at Trek-Lite).

 

[Jerry Adams]

Hard to tell any difference between brs and brs clone based on that picture

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

The clones are true clone more than likely manufactured by BRS.  They did versions for Oilicamp and others.  The knockoff are where the problems occur

[Jerry Adams]

too bad there isn’t a way to determine whether a particular stove is a good one

the failure of the arm on some stoves has never been explained very well.  Hard to know whether that is a design weakness that could affect any stove, or just inferior materials or workmanship on a particular stove

[Roger Caffin]

A good picture, thank you Jon.
As Jon says, the 2 labelled clones at the top are just rebranded versions. Legit.
The Fire Maple Hornet and FMS-116T are good stoves, and the rebranded versions are the same.
The ones with wild support arms are definitely fakes and even rebranded fakes.

By and large, the pot support arms themselves do NOT fail, despite all the internet waffle one sees. The failures which happens come in two classes: outright stupidity (he sat on it) and vastly excess weight (cast iron pot) being applied to the support RING under the burner head. I have seen several examples of that. This second class is still stupidity: one can never avoid a lot of that.

Now to Bill’s question: how can one tell the difference?
Long experience of the market
An obviously stupid design
Unknown transient brand
Sadly, none of these help the novice.

HTH
Cheers

[Jerry Adams]

when I stare at a real BRS and a fake BRS I can not tell the difference.  The label is slightly different.

Was it Jon that posted a picture of a failure recently?  Unfortunately, we don’t know what weight was put on it, whether it was run at high speed, and the picture didn’t show where it failed, it was hidden.

It would be interesting to see a good failure analysis.

Anecdotally, it seems like if your stove works, you run at fairly slow speed, and don’t put too much weight on it then it should be reliable.

[Roger Caffin]

Hi Jerry
But what do you mean by ‘fake’?
The two ‘clones’ at the top of the figure are not fakes: they are just rebranded. Same stove. OEM.
The rest are obviously NOT genuine BRS-300T stoves.

As for where the BRS-3000T stove failed: see jpg below.

Look at the pot support to the right. It is NOT bent.
Now look at the small bracket which holds the pivoting arm: it IS bent. Badly twisted, but that part does not get the flame. It takes significant force to do that.

Rather than waffle about it, I decided to actually measure the force needed to twist a bit of Ti of the same size. (Yes, I carry Ti sheet in several sizes.)

My physical testing showed that a force of over 7 kg is needed at (about) the tip of the BRS pot support to get this twist. (Metric fish scale.)

All this has been posted to BPL before.

Cheers

 

[Jerry Adams]

I see what you mean when saying the failure is caused by the bracket twisting.  Looking at my brs that makes sense.

And it seems like your failure test is good – that’s the failure.  You’re making a reasonable conclusion.

Anecdotally, failures happen when the stove runs at high speed.  But, like you said, that piece of metal is out of the flame.  So, that’s confusing.  Maybe the anecdotes are wrong.

The flat piece that twists at failure isn’t designed optimally.  It shouldn’t just be a flat piece.  A flat piece of metal isn’t as strong as if it had a fold along it.  If they stamped some shape into it it would be stronger.

Like the arms have a shape stamped into them that makes them stronger.  If they were just flat they would be more likely to twist.

I wonder what the user did for the stove that failed?  How much weight did he put on?  Did he run it at high?

Ryan tested some stoves for his testing and reported some failures.  I wonder if he ran at high and how much weight he put on the stove

It seems like there’s more to this story

In the gear skeptics video tribute to his dad, it showed his home shop.  An ancient lathe.  Lots of stuff he made.  It reminds me of your workshop

[Roger Caffin]

I wonder what the user did for the stove that failed? How much weight did he put on? Did he run it at high?
I do not think the flame height had anything to do with the bend. For a start, the flames did not come near the bent pivot, so it cannot have got very hot. Oh sure, maybe 150 C, but that is nothing.
Second, all three bent pivots are at the same relative position: why was only one affected by heat?
No, I firmly believe that the damage was done by direct force.

In fact, given a suitable bit of direct force, I do not think heat was even needed for the damage. Unless of course someone burnt his fingers and the ensuing flailing around did the damage?

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of happy BRS users continue to cook their dinners, or make their coffee.

Cheers

[Jerry Adams]

I agree there are many happy users.  I like that it weighs 1 ounce rather than the 3 ounces of other stoves.

Still, there are enough reports of people that say it failed when they were on high power that it leaves doubt that there really is something there

Why does just one arm fail?  The heat distribution across the three arms won’t be the same.  Maybe the flame comes out more in one direction or a slight breeze will be blowing it in one direction.

The arm that rotates is between the flame and the bracket that fails so it doesn’t seem like the bracket would get that hot which contradicts the idea that the failure is caused by high heat.

It seems like there’s more to this story but maybe all it is is people putting too much weight on it…

[Roger Caffin]

I did see one report of a failure, from a guy who was cooking dinner.
Dinner for 4 -5 people in a large cast iron cooking pot.
Yeah, uh, well …

Cheers

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

So, I bought the Neoross ring shaped windscreen for teh BRS 3000t stove to test out.  It’s always good to see how you perform relative to the competition.

 

It is light (14 g). made of titanium and much better than a naked BRS but . . .   meh.

My 2 cents

 

[Roger Caffin]

Biased opinion (of course):
The Neoross does not really address the problem. It lets the wind go under the pot, blowing the flames away. I am sure that it helps a little bit, but only a little. I doubt the makers understood the problem.

Any good windscreen comes at least 10 mm, maybe 20 mm, above the bottom edge of the pot. A really really good windscreen comes up even higher, and can handle all conditions well.

What I do not understand is why there is so much unwillingness to use such a windscreen. The weight is very small, they are very easy to carry wrapped around a water bottle, and the performance improvement is good. After a few days the fuel weight savings easily exceed the weight of the windscreen, and one gets one’s dinner (or coffee) so much faster.

Cheers

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

The Neoross concept addresses three things that people consider important; whether they are or not is another story. A) a simple device that is easy to use B) stores inside a mug along with a fuel canister and C) cheap (because I paid less than $10 for the stove). The funny thing to me is that actual efficiency does not seem to be important for people.

Roger, I am in your camp. For my backpacking trips with my wife use a remote, invertible stove and a full wrap windscreen.

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

Any good windscreen comes at least 10 mm, maybe 20 mm, above the bottom edge of the pot. A really really good windscreen comes up even higher, and can handle all conditions well.

Funny you should mention this. The first versions of the Ocelot windscreens came out with tall windscreens; maybe 1.5″ to 2″ above the bottom of the pot. The taller, the more efficient, that makes sense. Soon afterwards, a customer sent me a video, where he was running the stove full on and the windscreen was glowing bright red at the top edge and asked if this was normal. I quickly cut the windscreens down, replaced all of the units that I had sent out and added a sticker to have them limit the output to 1/3 full.  You can never underestimate the customer.

[Roger Caffin]

Hi Jon

Ah, but what material was the windscreen made of? If it was Ti, then red hot does not matter – unless the user is clumsy of course.

But if the top of the windscreen IS red hot, that implies that there is a lot of energy going up beside the pot and being wasted. A lot. I don’t run my stoves that hot in the field.

HTH, cheers

 

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

The material was stainless steel. The material is fine; customers being exposed to that level of temperature is problematic. You are going to get wasted energy no matter what. A good system may be 60% efficient so 40% is going to be waste. I recommend people tune their system to be able to boil 500ml in 4-6 minutes, that means that they are delivering about 700 watts to the water. A 2-minute boil means you are delivering about 1300 watts. That waste wattage will heat up a 0.004” windscreen pretty quick and to a very high temperature. My 2 cents.

[Casey Bowden]

Jon, thank you for purchasing the “neoross” and letting us know your thoughts.

[Ronald Stokley]

Jon- Thanks! I was not able to find who manufactured the Ti Ring “windscreen” or anything else about it. I appreciate your input.

BTW- I now use the SOTO WindMaster with a TriFlex pot support along with a modified Fire Maple Petrel G3 Pot. I removed the handle from the pot and replaced it with a heavily modified MSR LiteLifter. An old Ruta Locura carbon fibre lid tops out my kit.

[Miner]

For the CDT and AT, with my BRS I used a pretty common wind screen that rolls up with some holes punched around the perimeter at the bottom. I used a rubber band to hold while it rolled up. Exact model isn’t showing up in my Amazon order search for some reason.  I found that was more than sufficient to handle strong winds that I encountered for the 5+ months on both trails.

I normally make sure there is adequate space around the canister so it didn’t get hot; I once let it get tight with little space and the canister was pretty warm, so learned my lesson.

As for clones, I accidentally bought one last year on the AT, when my stove got lost in the mail to GA. It was slightly taller than my lost one. And it got hotter to the touch on the tube from the canister. I bought from a different Amazon seller than before, because I needed it overnight from Amazon to a small town. Wish I hadn’t but the stove worked for the 5 months that I needed, so I guess I got my money’s worth.

[Bill Budney]

Those tall titanium roll-ups are the lightest and most effective windscreens I’ve tried. I look for the 19cm/7.5″ versions instead of the more common 15cm/6″, but either may suffice. As suggested by Roger and others above, they do more than just block the wind. They route the hot air around the sides of the pot, which results in the efficiency of a heat exchanger without the extra weight.

As Jon points out, the windscreen can get very hot, so you have to use your head. Don’t try to use maximum throttle, for example. You’ll get better fuel efficiency with a lower flame.

Tip: Instead of resting the bottom of the windscreen on the ground, I suspend mine from the top of my pot. I use a couple of poultry-lacing “stakes” from the grocery store (through the adjustment holes in the windscreen), but any stiff wire will do. Titanium tent stakes should also work.

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