Cool IR images of a few Canister topped stove from reddit

interesting

BRS3000 valve gets hot.  I wonder if there’s a risk of failure.

On all of them, you can see how only the top part of the canister gets warm, but that’s not where the butane is inside, so it doesn’t help when it’s cold.  You want the heat at the bottom of the canister where the butane is.

BRS3000 valve gets hot. I wonder if there’s a risk of failure.
Of course there is a risk of failure: there is in anything. But very little in this case.
* First, the flow of gas past the tip of the valve will provide some cooling.
* Second, heat flow into the canister will also provide some cooling – quite a lot in fact.
* Third, there is no problem with ‘getting hot’ provided the temperature is under the max operating temp for the O-ring on the needle valve. The BRS is a well-made stove with a Viton O-ring, and Viton is rated for operation up to about 240 C. I do not think the stove will reach that temperature. :)

On all of them, you can see how only the top part of the canister gets warm, but that’s not where the butane is inside, so it doesn’t help when it’s cold. You want the heat at the bottom of the canister where the butane is.
That is NOT how the physics works.

To be sure the part of the canister above the level of fuel inside will get hotter than the part in contact with the fuel. After all, any spare heat in the steel in contact with the fuel will go straight into the fuel, to evaporate it. However, heat flows from the hot steel above into the cold steel all the time, and heat from the hot steel will also flow into the gas inside which will then transfer that heat to the liquid below it.

This is in effect how heat gets to the liquid fuel to evaporate it. To be sure, some heat may couple from the ambient air (if warm enough) through the steel wall straight into the liquid fuel, but that is minor compared to the heat coming down from the stove under 3-season conditions.

So why can’t you use an upright stove at -20 C? It is all a matter of balance. At -20 C the canister is losing a lot of heat to the ambient, and it may be losing more that way than conduction down from the stove above can provide. So you might sit the canister in a bowl of water to help warm it up. After all, liquid water is above the boiling point of butane (-0.5 C).

Cheers