Finally, HX pots for home use.

In addition to speeding up any task involving lots of boiling water, the other times I’ve wanted a large HX pot is when I’m cooking something my wife finds distasteful like my bear stew (it’s fabulous – she just doesn’t like any red meat cooked in the house) but the side burner on my outdoor grill has trouble keeping up when it’s below freezing outside and windy or if it’s sub-zero at all.

link?

How about a heat-exchanger kettle to boil the water then transfer to the pots you already have?

I have an electric kettle (for tea). When I’m impatient and want to boil something, I put about half the water in the pot, and half the water in the kettle. When the kettle water boils, I pour it in and save a fair amount of time (I think).

They have some nice sizes for home and restaurant cooking:

sauce pan with side fins

frying pans also…how cool is that!

https://turbopot.com/products/

Brad: Here’s an Amazon link to the $76, 8-quart stock pot:

Casey: It looks like there’s a story behind that English HX tea kettle.

Ross: for 1 or 2 or 3 cups of near-boiling, 190F water, I’ve got an instant-hot-water dispenser – there’s a 1-quart, insulating SS tank under the sink, so for a cup of tea, steaming vegetables, or making a Cup-o-Noodles, there’s no waiting at all.  And for larger tasks, I’ll sometimes start off with that one hot quart.

Dan: In those photos in your second post, with the fins on the sides of the pots (especially that middle one), someone’s too focused on surface area and not on disrupting the boundary layer.  The dark, fluted one does look cool, though.

The second most weight-effective tweak I’ve ever down to a pot was small tabs of real metallic duct tape (the high-temp shiny super-sticky stuff, not the more cloth-like gray “duck tape”) at a 45 degree angle on the sides near the bottom of a pot.  (The most weight-effective tweak was to paint the bottom of a large diameter pot so it absorbed instead of reflected IR from the glowing-red burner head).

How do these compare for boiling water efficiency to induction? We’ve got a gas cooktop, but recently bought a single, portable 1800W induction burner and it’s great for boiling water fast. About half the time of gas in my not very scientific test. (It’s also good for cooking curry out on the deck, so the house doesn’t smell like curry for days).

A built-in induction cooktop would give you almost twice that maximum power per burner (3300W seems common). But a portable burner is pretty affordable (we paid $80), so long as you’ve already got stainless or cast iron pots.

Alas, until someone comes up with an ultralight 3kW solar panel, it’s not much use while backpacking.

Jim: The U.S. Department of Energy indicates an induction cooker is 84% efficient at energy transfer, versus 74% for a smooth-top electric unit.  My tests of kitchen-range gas burners find that a 10,000 BTU/hour gas burner transfers about 3,500 BTU/hour into the water in a standard pot and 5,000/hour into a HX pot.  10,000 BTU/hour (= 3kW) is a very common rating on home gas stoves and on many of our camping / backpacking stoves that use white gas, butane, or propane.

There are 3,412 BTUs in a kilowatt-hour, so your 1800W induction burner would transfer 1800/1000*3412*0.84 = 5,200 BTU/hour (and be quick to start and stop heating like gas is). Definitely superior in heating rate, heating efficiency, and quick response to traditional open-coil or flat-top electric-resistance elements.  And better than gas with a standard pot.  Very similar to gas with a HX pot.

The 3.3kW induction cooktop would be even faster heating (as would commercial gas burners at 20,000-30,000 BTU/hour and even more so with HX pots).

My gas is $0.94 per ccf (100,000 BTUs) while my electricity is $0.23/kWh (3412 BTUs).  So to boil 100 gallons of water from 70F would cost:
$3.17 using gas and a standard pot
$2.22 using gas and an HX pot
$9.46 using electric induction
$10.74 using electric resistance
But YMVV: most of the country has cheaper electricity (especially the Pacific NW) and most of the country should have cheaper gas – Henry Hub is at $0.27/ccf while our local wholesale price is about $0.70.

Your cooktop doesn’t add up to much usage, but your water heater does.

David, thx for the link.

but the side burner on my outdoor grill has trouble keeping up when it’s below freezing outside and windy or if it’s sub-zero at all.

David, have you made your bear stew yet in your new pot?

good calculations David – 30% reduction in gas used with HX pot – that’s pretty good

I don’t like gas – carbon monoxide, gas explosions, other indoor pollutants

I use one of those induction burners.  $50 at Amazon.  That works pretty good.  It’s more responsive than regular electric and even gas I believe.

Induction ranges are very expensive which is funny because the technology is not expensive.  As demonstrated by the cheap Amazon burner.  It’s just a coil of wire.  Maybe they’ll become more popular and the price will go down.  Since they’re more efficient, maybe the government should adopt policies to make this happen faster.

I would think gas would be cheaper in Alaska since it’s closer to the source.  Except they probably ship it to Texas to be refined, then send it back : )

Trouble with the induction ‘burners’ is the cost and weight of the extension lead….

Cheers

DanY: I’ve been using that home-style HX pot quite a bit in the kitchen.  It’s the only thing I use for pasta now – several quarts of water to boil.  I make my bear and caribou stew in a large fry pan because i brown the meat in really hot oil and then add water to the fry pan to deglaze the brown stuff off the pan.

Jerry: You’re old enough to probably remember the phrase “go stick your head in the oven” as in “go kill yourself” which didn’t entirely make sense to me.  I’ve mercy-killed injured critters in natural gas (it’s a bit of an anesthetic and I also plumb in a tap for NG in any house I’m in) but that was in 100% gas and by asphyxiation.  Then I was reading about “town gas” also called “manufactured gas” after “natural gas” was discovered in western US and Canadian oil fields.  Manufactured gas was generated locally, by heating coal in a low-oxygen chamber to drive off volatile compounds plus a fair bit of CO like as much as 30%.  THIRTY PERCENT!  That’s when that expression and some of the dire warnings about NG leaks made sense to me.  Of course large NG leaks are bad, here are one (of two) of my neighbors’ houses burning after a gas leak after a 7.1 three years ago:

but not because of CO, although was true in the early and mid 20th century.

Maybe those induction burners will take off in new construction in Berkeley and San Jose and any other jurisdictions that also ban natural gas use in new buildings.

NG is cheap in the 48 states because people go looking for oil, frac to get it, and bring up NG with the oil (most of the profit is in the liquids and the gas has been produced in excess for years now.  In Alaska, at least around Cook Inlet where most Alaskans live, the big oil reservoirs have played out and old fields are refurbished in order to meet new contracts for NG.  So they’re paying money to develop NG instead of bring up NG as a waste product.  There’s lots of stranded NG in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields but no way (LNG tankers or a pipeline) to get it to any market.  And there won’t be as long as global NG prices are so low.

David, I purchased this gently used beauty for 30 bucks. Will be used with my Origo marine alcohol stove while car camping.

2.5L MSR Reactor System pot: Boils enough for five freeze dried meals at once, or make it an expedition snow-melting powerhouse for 2-3 people.

I’ll be using it this winter to melt snow with my newly created Polar Vortex stove kit.

The second most weight-effective tweak I’ve ever down to a pot was small tabs of real metallic duct tape (the high-temp shiny super-sticky stuff, not the more cloth-like gray “duck tape”) at a 45 degree angle on the sides near the bottom of a pot

The Joule Thief got me thinking of exchange designs.  One of the photos I posted in this thread showed fins on the side of a pot. I quote the designer:

quote:
That said, transferring the principles of jet engine design into the domestic kitchen took some tinkering. Povey and a team of physics masters students at Oxford iterated through a dozen or so prototypes, all of which had to withstand being lit on fire. Besides performance, they needed a design that wouldn’t alienate consumers by looking weird or unfamiliar. One of Povey’s earliest models saw a 100 percent increase in performance (from harnessing 25 percent of the flame’s energy to 50 percent) but Povey says it wasn’t exactly a consumer-friendly product. “I showed it to the [Lakeland] licensee and they thought it was great, but insane.”

This is the pot he designed…….radical but efficient 

UM.
I can see the logic, but what about the extra weight? There is a lot of extra metal there, and I wonder whether the increase in energy transfer (ie reduced fuel weight) can ever match the increase in pot weight?

As for the increase in manufacturing costs . . . WOW!

On a more? less? practical note: it looks as though pouring out of the pot into something else might be rather difficult. That is not good.

Cheers

Wow, what a neat pot!

I wonder what the design choice for the slots cut into the fins at equally spaced intervals is all about. Maybe disruption of the hot gas boundary layers along the fin’s surface? The skinny portion of the fins even confuses me more than the slots, as I don’t have a single idea of what that’s all about. So much nuance to HX design, its facilitating.

Super neat! Thanks for the share!

Maybe disruption of the hot gas boundary layers along the fin’s surface?
Just trying to present a greater area of contact with the flow of hot gas. Bigger contact area => more heat transfer. (Up to a point)

The skinny portion of the fins even confuses me more than the slots, as I don’t have a single idea of what that’s all about.
Oh, that is just probably the long-haired arts faculty trying to say something about the aesthetics.
Actually, it is the bulge at the top which is (arguably) even more pointless.

My 2c :)
Cheers

There is a pot in this thread that reminded me of Tyler’s Joule fin design:

Yeah they look very similar! I think for me, it’s the fact they both have a wind shroud. Not many HX pots have them, I assume because they add additional weight.

The MSR reactor pots are interesting, I worked at REI for 4 years and we once had a msr sales rep come in with a pot that was cut in half to show a cross sectional view. The fins are surprisingly only on the bottom of the pot, on the side of the pot between the pot wall and outer wind shroud is an air gap.

The Joule Thief is a little different in that it does the opposite of this. Its fins are on the side of the pot between the wind shroud and the pot wall, while there are no fins on the bottom of the pot (though they do extend down past the length of the bottom on the side of the pot).

A Note on Why I did This:

Keeping the bottom of the pot clear of any fins was a designs choice I made inspired by Roger Caffin’s work from this article about CO emissions from stove systems. The idea here was that if I left that area clear of purpose designed heat transfering elements (like fins), there would be more time for the first exothermic reaction of C+O-> CO to undergo the second reaction Roger talks about in his article of CO + O -> CO2, so additional heat could be harvest from the second reaction. I have no clue if this worked, as I don’t have a means to test it. It would be interesting to get a Joule Thief in the hands of Roger and sees what comes of it… the thought equally excites and scares me.

Roger CaffinBPL MEMBER
UM.
I can see the logic, but what about the extra weight? There is a lot of extra metal there, and I wonder whether the increase in energy transfer (ie reduced fuel weight) can ever match the increase in pot weight?

It’s for home use. David’s thread was directed at HX pots for home use. ;)