first time using remote canister stove

When I’m melting snow on a trip (which is half the year here), I bring a heat-exchanger pot for better fuel efficiency. Also, did you use a wind screen?  That makes a big difference in efficiency. A sheet of heavy-duty aluminum is light and cheap way to do that.

Yeah, that torque from the tubing on some remote canister stoves is a bother. If you store it in the pot not the way it WANTS to twist, but the OTHER way, you can often overcome that.

It sounds like you were using the stove in a very high setting in order to burn through that much gas.  Let’s assume that the canister was cold and used in the inverted mode.  The valve would be controlling the flowrate of liquid and not gas so the should be turned down pretty low.  Usually, you light the stove upright in order to pre-heat the system and then turn the gas level down.  Then invert the canister and the stove should blast pretty high, then adjust the flowrate down again.  It is a little tricky but I would expect to get ~90% burns that you would normally get at warmer temperature.

It takes less energy (~1/2) to melt snow than to bring the same amount of water up from 32 F to a boil.

Maybe Hikin’ Jim can chime in as well.

For cold, windy snow melting, you may want to consider the MSR Reactor…those conditions seem to be for what it was designed.

Hmmm…on further thought and inspection, an inverted canister stove with an HE pot as suggested by David and Jon is likely a better solution.

With this stove, don’t you have the option to either have the canister inverted or upright? From things I’ve read, inverted is for cold conditions and you’re burning liquid fuel whereas upright it’s in gas form. Inverted burns fuel less efficiently, I believe.

Was it warm enough to run the stove with the canister upright instead of inverted?

The stove was able to operate with the canister in normal upright orientation. I flipped it over a few times to see what it would be like and it sure-enough increases the burn intensity. It was 31 deg. F in the morning when we woke up, so, before we made breakfast (i.e., boiled water) I put the canister in my jacket pocket for 15 minutes or so. By the time we started the stove it was probably 40 degF or so.

We used the wind shield.

It is the instability of the stove that bugged us the most.

Since we are new to using canisters, I am sure there will be a learning curve in terms of how much fuel to bring for a given trip.

I care a lot about stability. I’ve been using the Kovea Spider stove, another remote canister stove, on trips with my son. I like it a lot.

Never tried melting snow with it, but it’s capable of inverting the canister, so that should help.

More info here from Hikin Jim…

https://adventuresinstoving.blogspot.com/search?q=Kovea

Jon, It depends on the temperature of the snow. One water is frozen, it can then drop in temp like any other solid. Only the in between temps, as it changes states, will consume energy for no temperature increase.

I used a remote canister stove for two weeks this spring. Water froze solid in my water bottle, soo, I am guessing 20F or colder. I was getting about 5-6gm/2 cups boiled. Caffin Winter stove (modified FMT-300T, about 3oz,) 3/4 length Wind screen with 1/4″ clearance, HE/Grease pot with lid. Running about 1/3 power. All on a single 8oz canister…really amazing. But yes, it is soo light, removing the pot can lead to the stove flipping. I just expect it and don’t panic…it is off by then.

“It takes less energy (~1/2) to melt snow than to bring the same amount of water up from 32 F to a boil.”

Less energy, yeah, but close to the requirements of boiling.  144 BTUs to melt a pound of 32F ice to 32F water.  Then 180 BTUs to bring 32F water to boiling at 212F.  So 80% as much heat to melt ice as to bring ice-cold water to a boil.

So melting snow for your water roughly doubles your fuel needed for hot water.  And adds more fuel demands just to melt water to drink cold.

You rarely actually want fully boiling water – 180-190F water is plenty for tea or cocoa.  190-200F is fine for reconstituting F-D food.  Only when there is actually cooking going in the pot do you need/want a simmer.  Or heat to a simmer, turn off and cover with a cozy, repeating as needed.  Because at that those higher temperatures, there is a lot more evaporative loss (it takes 970 BTUs to boil away a pound of water).

I always bring to boil to kill any possible pathogens. I figure maybe it’s overkill, but better safe than getting sick.

Yes, a lot of older remote-canister stoves have non-rotating hoses, and very stiff hoses as well. They can be a real problem for flipping over. But then, a lot of the older stoves are boat anchors as well.

More recently, most Asian remote canister stove mfrs have developed rotating connections, for this reason. That makes things a lot better. There is no reason to accept less now.

Some of those older hoses are huge and very stiff. That is because the mfrs used 1/4″ race car fuel tubing for the hose: it was cheap, robust and fuel-resistant. It was designed to be semi-rigid to handle race car vibrations. But it made like a handle on a hammer.

For my Winter Stoves I went to 1/8″ tubing using a more flexible PFA hose with a lighter SS braid. A custom design, and more expensive but far more suitable for a UL stove. Of course rotating connections at both ends were used. The stoves can sit flat without a pot: you just twist the hose to suit.

We melted about five 1.2 L pots to completely empty an 8 oz MSR fuel canister.
That is extreme. You had your stove going absolutely flat out and wasting fuel like mad. Go a little slower.

Cheers

“I always bring to boil to kill any possible pathogens. I figure maybe it’s overkill, but better safe than getting sick.”

It is overkill (literally) but to each their own.  HYOH .  BYOW (boil your own water).

While there are a few benign-to-us extremophile bacteria (say, living around volcanic ocean vents), the infectious ones gets eliminated by pasteurization e.g. heating to below boiling.  If you have lots of time as you do with solar heating, 140F is enough.  160F and it happens faster.  180F for any practical length of time (i.e. you’re not heating it instantly and cooling it instantly) and you’re good.  But since those are hard to judge in the field, I using stop at the first sign of a simmer.  Or, if in a large pot heating more slowly, when it’s hot enough to make tea or cocoa, it has had enough time at temperature.

Thanks David, I googled a bit and found similar info to what you stated about boiling. That’ll save me a bit of fuel!