Let's talk STOVE Safety

Some things should not be speed contests.

Dropped a Sigg bottle full of fuel. It was not closed and as it was rolling off the fuel was ignited. Like a tiny flamethrower rolling down the grass hillside. Good thing for dew.

Here is a recent post made over at Whiteblaze:

Slo-go’en 04-02-2017, 18:44
The problem with white gas stoves is they often don’t like to simmer very well. What they are good at is getting cold water to boil in a hurry, which is why they are preferred winter stoves.

Coleman Peak One have a reputation for being fire bombs. The fittings would loosen up, then leak under pressure. This usually wasn’t apparent until trying to relight the stove after it has sit for a bit and was sitting in a puddle of fuel. I had to drop kick a few of those out of the cabin I was caretaking. However, when they did work right, they were one of the few white gas stoves which did do a decent simmer.

<b><u>At Tomas Knob shelter I saw someone set fire to his Whisper light fuel bottle with a jet coming out of the pump assembly. He kicked that flaming mess out of the shelter, right on top of someone’s pack! (thankfully, no serious damage was done). And this guy claimed to be a former thru hiker, but turns out he only made it a few 100 miles. </u></b>

If you do get your Whisperlite to blaze up, be sure to jump over the blaze in your flip flops (as in the video).

Worst for me was lighting a Whisperlite which then proceeded to leak around the pump (the O ring was old).  The resultant puddle caught fire.

Let’s see.  Bottle of white gas sitting in a puddle of white gas on fire.  Oh, yeah.  Good times.

HJ

“Some things should not be speed contests.”

Yeah.  That.

I’ve singed my eyebrows with my Whisperlight – white gas is dangerous, although with care they can be used safely

I’ve used canister stoves in recent years, way more nights total, no incidents

I know of someone that used white gas to start a fire and seriously burned their legs

Another quote from WB:

04-08-2017, 18:52 Sarcasm the elf

My Coleman Peak1 was drop kicked down a hill by a fellow boyscout who was a know it all and didn’t believe me that the stove was full, pressurized, and ready to use. Instead he tried to cook on it when I was away from campsite and proceeded to read the directions and pump it as though it had just been filled. Unreliable witnesses claimed it put out 4-6 foot flames when lit.

I still have the stove, but the O-rings never held pressure well after that.

One shouldn’t condemn a stove because of user error or a failure to perform required maintenance.

That would apply to drop kicking a stove

Priming a stove can be done safely if you’re careful, but I have heard many people report an eyebrow singing experience.  You could call that user error.

But in general yeah, you shouldn’t condemn a stove for user error

Nice to see there’s empathy for stoves on BPL :  )

Some notable ones:

-My favorite: 12 year old tossing a lit operating canister stove to another 12 year old, expecting him to catch it. Yep.

-Someone burning a finger over an alcohol stove, not seeing the flame.

-Classic white gas fireball, resulting in singed arm and facial hair. Personally haven’t used one in many years having learned to use canister stoves with heat tubes and appropriate technique. Then again I haven’t been winter backpacking in extreme cold Northeast mountain temps in some years.

Hikin Jim was kind enough to demonstrate the massive fireball priming technique at one GGG. Light up half an acre. Like a miniature sun ☀️.

Watch this one:

And another one. Advance video to minuite 7:00 and watch from there.

Be careful:

How to dispose of canisters :-)

Duplicate oops

One shouldn’t condemn a stove because of user error or a failure to perform required maintenance.
Nick G

Nor should one condemn a stove because the user had an IQ in the low 2-digit range. Basically, I am all for Darwin: the world is over-populated anyhow. Some culling would not go amiss.

Cheers
PS: I used a Coleman Peak One Apex on kero for many years, and it never leaked once. But the kero stank. I won’t touch white gas any more.

nice videos DY : )

This all reminds me of my beloved Svea stove from when I was a kid. The pumping, the priming, the wincing and breath holding when you dropped a match on the burner. And then nothing. Do it all again. Etc.

and yet the damn things were indestructible. Well, so is a Pocket Rocket.

.

https://whiteblaze.net/forum/show…lite&p=1834238

Foresight
1 Attachment(s)
26 year old whisperlite….

….almost bought the farm yesterday. I was heating water for my coffee press and noticed I had a slow drip from where the pump screws into the bottle. Not one to leave well enough alone, I decided to snug it up a tad. Bad idea. The drip turned to a spray and now I had a pretty good inferno going, lol.

Since the water was almost at a boil I salvaged it first then stripped down and dunked my long sleeve t-shirt in a mud puddle and smothered said inferno. Knowing this thing was going to blaze back up given the least bit of opportunity I readied for the battle by soaking everything I could find in the mud hole and staging it nearby, mainly moss and grass….took a peek and sure enough, whoosh, inferno.

Covered everything with the wet grass and moss then re-soaked my shirt and managed to get the stove separated from the fuel bottle and tossed it onto a bare rock where it burned out. The stove itself came out unscathed, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to break down and finally switch to that new style pump due to some melting.

Hillbilly Deluxe tries to Blow Himself Up (Explosion)

There are some real idiots portrayed on this thread.  And leave it to Scouts to have a stove speed test.  And then laughing about it afterwards with chortles heard thruout the campground.

And the butane idiocy really shows our monkey evolutionary roots.  And we wonder why we have forest fires in the Southeast and in the West.

Somebody recently blew off their hand trying to start a fire on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania.

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/police/mc-hawk-mountain-search-and-rescue-20170316-story.html

Some people say it was black powder, others say it was an M-80 type firework possibly carried to scare away a bear.

Watching these videos, I realized that while I know to not add water to a gasoline fire (the gasoline floats on top and it can spread the gasoline further), I don’t know if water helps deal with an alcohol fire?  Since alcohol is completely miscible in water, the more water, the lower the alcohol vapor pressure of the mixture (e.g. you can flambe with brandy but not wine) is my prediction, but I haven’t tested that.

Hi David

Controlled experiment at home on a metal tray?
But I think you are right: adding lots of water to an alcohol fire could extinguish it. But I think it would need to be LOTS.

Cheers