Insul-bright for cozies

Mario, does your pot have a bail handle? I couldn’t tell from the pictures.  Seems like since this cozy is fabric and squishable, you could set the hot pot onto the cozy, fold back the handles, and carefully work the fabric back into place. Might not be so easy with a pot full of hot water!

Hi Diane, no bail handle.  The pot on my above picture is an evernew UL 900ml (which I normally use for solo trips) also made a similar one for my evernew UL 1300ml (which is good for 2 people).  These two pots nest nicely when I need more capacity or plan to do multi-course meals.  (No reason to skimp on the meals when backpacking, hahahahah)

One last thing I forgot to ask, Mario. Is the drawstring top on your sack insulated, too? I’ve seen a pot cozy that has an uninsulated collar, but it looks like the InsulBrite cinches in nicely with the drawstring if yours has insulation to the drawstring.

By the way, nice place for a first test!

Diane, yes the whole thing is insulated.  Except for the channel for the drawstring.  Basically I encased the insul-bright with a piece of silnylon twice+1″ as long folded over.  I made the 0.5″ drawstring channel at the fold of the silnylon.  For the bottom of the insulated stuff sack (And the top insulated disk) I had a sandwich of 3 round pieces (silnylon-insulbright-silnylon) of the same size.

And, if you are careful with flames, you now have a potholder with the separate disk.  Might be one reason to use cotton on the disk part as the outer fabric.

I might have to try this.  The orange stuff sack that comes with the TOAKS pots is a little thick, but doesn’t seem like it would work very well as a cozy.

Great thread!  I assume you all have seen the GG Warm Sack:

http://gossamergear.com/warm-sack-ultralight-pot-cozy.html

I just wish they offered other sizes.  This thread is inspiring me to now learn how to sew! :)

David, thanks for posting about the GG Warm Sack.  I was not aware of it.

I think this is a good MYOG project for beginners.  Sewing the circular bottom to the walls of the stuff sack was a bit challenging and took me a couple of iterations on scraps first, but other than that the project is pretty simple.

Below, a video of somebody making a round bottom stuff sack.  (For the cozy you basically are doing an insulated round bottom stuff sack).  It’s a fairly long video, but you may find useful the “technique” he describes in minutes 10:30-11:40 for sewing the round bottom to the walls.  Again I suggest you practice first with some scraps to get the size right.  Making the cozy not too tight (i.e 1/8″ gap) will make it easier to put your pot inside the cozy.

I’m not sure what is the benefit of “GG warm sack” non-insulated top.  I would think this is where you want most of the insulation, as warm air tends to go up.  As you can see in my pictures, I actually have an additional insulated disk I use to seal the small opening left by the drawstring when closed.  This seams to work well.

Great video – thanks Mario!

re:  the GG Warm Sack, I believe they leave the top part un-insulated because the pot it’s meant to work with is half the height of the bag.  The rest of the bag is used to store other cook set items with the pot.  Here’s a good review to check out:

https://ulgearblog.com/2015/08/09/featured-gear-gossamer-gear-warm-sack/

You could make it like a regular stuff sack and insert the pot sideways. Use the handles and slide it in and close the draw cord. Simpler.

KT,
Using the cozy like a regular stuff sack leaving the handles out as you suggest makes it MUCH easier to put the pot inside the cozy.  Here is a picture of one of my cozies used as you suggest.

Unfortunately there are a couple of drawbacks.  1) The cozy can not be used while eating from the pot (as shown in my earlier pictures), which is probably not a big deal unless one takes a long time to eat and wants to keep food warmer while eating, and 2) there is a loose of efficiency due to the gap on the handles.

i did a similar test as before using the cozy in this configuration.  I brought two cups of water to boil, put the pot in the cozy and took temp measurements at set intervals.  Here is what I got:

Minutes     Temp
0                212
10              188
20              167
30              152

Perhaps this results can be improved by adding a flap in-between the handles to keep the heat from leaking thru there?

mmmm….. i think I need to repeat this testing with the same pot / cozy I did the first time so results are comparable.  The last picture is on a 1.3L evernew pot and the first set was on a 0.9L evenew pot.  Although both test were with 2 cups of water perhaps the results are altered by the volume of the pots?.  i have my 0.9L pot in storage, I’ll try to repeat the test tomorrow.

so fwiw, I repeated this testing using my 0.9L evernew pot / MYOG cozy in KT’s suggested configuration (i.e pot handles out and as a result a non-insulated gap in-between the handles).   It appears its quite important not to have any gap for the cozy to be effective.  The results with handles out (and a gap) is not much different than not using a cozy at all.  Here is the results I got:

Min    Temp
0         212
10       191
20       176
30       164

I tested my cozy (the argyle one from page 1 of this thread) and quickly found a flaw in it.  The soot from the wood burning stove makes the bottom of the pot sticky, so it’s nigh impossible to get inside the bottom half of the cozy.

My new solution (no photos right now but I’ll get some of it in the field next month) is a small CCF bottom cozy made with hot glue, which only goes up to the handles of the pot.  I used stiff foam so it’s easy to set the pot down.  Then the insulbright top goes over it.  For storage the insulbright doubles as a stuff sack.

The more I use it the more I like this system – it bypasses the difficulty of putting the pot inside the stuff sack, but still doubles a stuff sack for storage.

Thanks for the testing. Appreciate it. You could of course slide the pot in with the handles folded. On my last trip I used a cozy designed for freezer bags and just slid in my 600ml pot and folded the handles in and closed the flap. Was still too hot to eat a half hour later. And if you hold the handles while eating out of the pot the heat of the pot is not an issue either. Winter camping, different outcome.

Nick, looking forward to your pictures.  I normally do not use wood burning stoves so sticky bottoms are not a problem for me but I’m curious to see your set up.

KT, that definitely would work.  Again it seems that the key for an efficient cozy is not to have any large gaps (as when the handles are left outside).  Actually provided that the cozy has a bit of room, setting the pot inside the cozy as originally discussed is not a problem.  In the following video I show how easy is to do it…. and as Diane suggested earlier in this thread, I’m using the insulated disk that seals the drawstring closure as pot holder.

Beautiful.

I finally was able to sew an insulated stuff sack for my TOAKS 650 ml mug kit, with the idea that I’ll heat the water, pour it into a freezer bag, then put the freezer bag back  into the empty pot in the cozy to hydrate, then fold the ziploc bag edges over the edges of the pot to eat out of.  Hopefully, it will be the best of both worlds–FBC cooking for no dishes, but firm pot to hold and scoop out of. I did find a couple of new videos that made the round-bottom stuff sack construction easier:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61vbtJR67W8

She has a great pattern, and a downloadable Excel calculator for figuring out the sizing of the pieces to cut, that was really easy, plus a pattern for round-bottom stuff sacks. She also has a separate video that gives 4 different ways to construct a drawstring channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04juQ1eQQ90

Hope that helps.

Thanks Diana for posting those links on “how to sew a round bottom stuff sack” and “4 different ways to sew drawstrings”.  She does have some great tutorials in her YouTube channel and goes into great detail on how to get things done.  Looks like her channel is fairly new yet already has many great videos.  I have subscribed to her channel.

I made one of these back in November and have been using similar to Diane with a freezer bag and my Toaks 600ml pot. I struggled a bit with the round bottom, so the videos are of interest.

I also added a coupe flaps to my lid to help with the use as a hot pad.

It is nice to save the bulk compared to the original cozy.

ooh, I like the flaps, might have to do that to my lid as well!

It’s great that mine is in a patterned fabric, it’s not so easy to see the HUGE sewing errors.  But hey, it works, and sometime maybe I’ll cut and sew another one according to the other videos, with better results.  I had already cut out my fabric pieces by the time I found the above YouTube videos, so the circle was rather speculative at best.  With mine being two layers, with InsulShine being the inside lining, and the RBTR fabric on the outside, it was a challenge to keep everything together for the sewing of the bottom.

Finally remembered to take a photo of the cozy in action.  I like the function.  I have the boiling water in the pot, pour into the freezer bag, then tuck the pot into the cozy, and the bag into the pot, close everything up, and let it sit.  The freezer bag ju-u-u-st is able to unfold around the top of the cozy when it is time to eat,  so it is easy to eat out of, and the cozy makes it easy to hold the pot.  Only one cozy for both eating and the pot, much simpler than my two person set up, where I have a cozy for the pot, and a cozy for each person to eat out of.

Here’s a thought. My TOAKS billy came with the protective open weave sack, I just put the hot billy into the supplied stuff cask and inside something else I have handy I actually thought that was what they were for, all I have been doing is placing my bandanna inside first because my cotton bandanna is easily  washable, I suppose tho that being cotton it does protect the polyester 3-D mesh from heat

re: adding some insulation to the stock Toaks stuff sack to create a cozy

The pot has never been hot enough to damage the reflectix.

Looks nice Diane–love those colors.