stove for winter

[Ralph Burgess]

Diane started a recent thread on water carry in winter, that I have found really helpful.

http://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/water-carry-in-winter/

As an inexperienced winter hiker, another area where I feel like I don’t have a lot of leeway to learn from my mistakes is the choice of stove.   In summer, a failed stove just means cold dinner, but in winter it may be the only water source.  Could some of the experts on in give some advice and ideas?   I generally use a Jetboil, and I have little experience with anything other than isopropane canister systems.  First of all, what are the temperature limits of an upright isopropane cansister system, and what measures might you adopt if close to the limit?   What is the best stove for colder temperatures if the prioirty is reliability and simplicity (i.e. setting aside weight saving concerns for now)?

 

[Ken Thompson]

What are the coldest temps you expect to experience?

[Jerry Adams]

upright good down to 30 F, maybe 25 F – assuming you have iso-butane – all stoves are pretty much the same, it’s a property of the fuel.  There’s usually some propane in the mix which helps, especially when the canister is close to full.

the problem is that the fuel evaporates inside the canister which makes it colder, so it slows way down

inverted stove good much colder, I forget the minimum temp, maybe 10 F or 0 F

Roger has sold a good stove in the past.  There are brands like Kovea Spider.

fuel doesn’t evaporate inside canister making it colder, except for a tiny amount to offset the liquid that leaves the canister.

problem with inverted stove, is that the liquid that leaves the canister carries impurities which can gum up the valve.  You should know how to take apart the valve and clean it, which isn’t that difficult, but cancels out the simplicity of an upright.  With an upright, only gas leaves the canister and the impurities are left in the canister.

you can cheat with an upright:

you can put the canister into a small container of water to heat up the canister.  You occasionally may have to put a small amount of heated water in it to keep it from freezing.  There’s a thread about turning canister upside down, putting water in the concave bottom, and put a plastic lid on it, then turn canister right side up and use it.  I keep looking for the right size lid.

you can have an aluminum strip that goes into the flame, and goes down next to the canister with a velcro strip or wire around it to keep the strip in place.  A number of threads about that

You can warm the canister up in your pocket or sleeping bag, but since evaporation inside the canister cools it down, this only works for a short while.

You better experiment with either of those to make sure it works.  Find a time and place where it will be your minimum temperature and then try it out.  You should be able to go down to 10 F or so.

Roger has some excellent articles about stoves and fuel and such

There’s always white gas.  It helps if you have no eyebrows to singe and your smeller is broke so you don’t have to breath those fumes : )  And it’s heavy.

[Ralph Burgess]

K T,  given my own limited experience, nothing below about 0F at the extreme for now.

[Ralph Burgess]

jerry, thanks for that, that’s a great start

I’ll start huntiing through old threads and put links up later to what I can find

[Bob Moulder]

Check out this one.

Only difference is now I’m using simple 0.020″ copper for the strip, but otherwise the same.

[Stephen M]

I have used inverted canisters down to -15f wirh no issues.

[Roger Caffin]

We have a lot of winter stove articles. They get as technical as you could want.

Cheers

 

[Ken Thompson]

Roger. If you search winter stoves you will get results. If you then click on articles you get none.

————

EDIT: this may have been a temporary bug. I searched on “winter stove’, got results, clicked and got articles.

Roger

 

[r m]

What is the best stove for colder temperatures if the prioirty is reliability

MSR XGK Ex

and simplicity

Ah. XGK isn’t all that simple.

Here’s an idea on the reliability front for jetboils:
Carry a spare burner (the jetboil soil burner is ~102g, generic burners get much lighter – all the way down to 25g). If you have multiple canisters, then you can survive most sorts of failure. (Last trip I had a canister that kept leaking, not sure if it was ice or crud in the cylinder screwing up the seal).

The XGK is reliable in the sense that you can maintain it in the field. It also sucks for running in your tent or any sort of confined space and is easy to have an accident with.

Can’t comment much on Jetboils at 0F, sadly my part of the world is not all that cold. If it was just water for me, I’d try to make the JB work.

[James Marco]

I’m getting too old for much winter camping. But, cold weather camping is a bit of an art when it comes to fuel usage. Pressure drops off with the temperature. It does this pretty continuously, so there is no real sweet spot on the dial you can use. You have to get used to the sound it makes, and the visual height of the flame.

With “toppers” (stoves that simply screw on the top of a canister,) it starts being a noticeable drop off at around 45F or so. Some a bit before that some after that, depending on the size of the lines, valve opening & delicacy of adjustment, jet opening, fuel type/blend, wind, etc. By the time it gets down to around 25F it will usually light, then stay lit on a slow flame and eventually die off…basically unusable. Between 25F and 45F is where things get a little interesting. Sometimes it works (with a new canister, or a warmed up one,) and sometimes people have a hard time keeping anything lit. They often resort to warming one canister over the flame from another, then switching canisters to start warming up water, then placing the can in a warm water bath. Usually they work, sort-of anyway, if the water is around 34F but the topper/canister combination is not the best in winter. That includes the JetBoil. Mine starts dropping off from about 1:30 for half a liter to around 4-5 minutes.

In comes the inverted stoves. They work with only marginal pressure to feed the liquid fuel to an expansion chamber, often a tube in the flame. However, these do require a minimum pressure to run. The Caffin Stove just uses a Heat Shunt to do the same job of warming up the gas before burning it but this is prone to largish fireballs, similar to, but smaller than white gas, till the valve assembly is warmed up.

Pure butane (n-butane or normal butane) and even isobutane still fails in cold weather. Some propane is needed to keep these pressurized. (A topper also uses up the propane preferentially leaving about the last 25% in the can with only traces of propane left and unusable in cold weather.)  An inverted canister maintains a pretty even gas mixture down to about -30F or so. But they get increasingly difficult to maintain much below 0F.

I used to use white gas. At -10F it would always burn. But the stoves that run WG are notoriously heavy. The fuel, however, is much lighter than a standard canister fuel. It usually contains about 20,000BTU as opposed to 21,000BTU for mixed canister gas. But the can weighs about 1/3-1/2 again the weight of the fuel. Typically, a well tuned stove of either is roughly equivalent at extracting heat values from your fuel. Yes, you loose about a half to a full teaspoon for priming a WG stove. But, in winter, you will be typically making about 4-5 liters per day(including coffee/tea/cocoa) plus meals. You will be using around 2-3oz per day for melting snow (it takes a lot more heat to melt snow than to boil liquid water, roughly, about as much heat to melt 0F snow to 40F as to bring 40F water to boiling.) Or you would use about a half or more of a 4oz canister per day. If you are out for week with your partner, it just don’t matter. You will save the weight of all the empty canisters but carry the extra weight of a heavier stove. It evens out, roughly speaking.

Personally, I would go with a reliable WG stove for cool and cold weather. Reserve the JetBoil for >40F. The copper strip down to the can can be made to work, but again, it relies on a fairly full canister, not a half full one, to work reliably. Without even a starting flame, it won’t ever warm the strip or the gas to even work. You end up using a couple canisters, as I explained above. Cold starts and maintaining enough flame to warm the stove up…this is the basic problem. Even the Caffin Stove requires about one minute. The strip add-ons likely require more. Unless, of course, you LIKE fiddling around and sleeping with your canisters.

[Ralph Burgess]

Thanks for all the help.

From what I’ve read so far, I’m leaning towards picking up two stoves:

MSR Wind Pro II – for intermediate conditions.  Looks like an elegant design, use the canister either way up.  It’s light enough that I envision it may just replace my Jetboil for routine use, giving me fewer worries in marginally cold conditions.

MSR XGK-EX.   I think I’m going to bite the bullet on learning how to use a white gas stove.    It sounds like I’ll have a learning curve on this, but once I know how to handle it safely it will be bulletproof for anything I’m going to encounter.  The weight penalty over the other MSR white gas stoves is small.

I’m living at 7000′ in Santa Fe now, so I can mess with stuff in pretty demanding conditions over the next couple of months on my porch, then graduate to some short test trips in the Pecos before I do anything more adventuruous.

Roger, are you still producing your custom stoves?

[Bob Moulder]

Jetboil MiniMo with partially used canister chugging along happily at +3°F after sitting out all night and starting with no pre-warming of the canister. It can be done.

 

[Marc-André Hernandez]

I have an old gen himalaya Primus stove that I use in winter. It’s quite heavy, but since we are usually 3 or more when we camp in winter, it’s manageable. Using WB is not a big deal, once you know how to prime it.  And you can choose the amount of fuel you want to carry. Actually I find the noise to be the most annoying factor of this burner.

[Jerry Adams]

post a WTB and maybe someone would sell their Caffin stove

white gas – the problem is when you prime it – put a puddle of fuel at the cup the burner comes out of and light it.  Whoooosh.  Keep your head away from the fireball.  This is especially bad when it’s hot.

singing hairs isn’t really that bad.  the flame whooshes by and isn’t there long enough to burn your skin or anything.  I’m probably over stating the risk : )

Look at Moulder’s link.  It isn’t that difficult to go down to 0 F.  You have to experiment first to make sure you’ve figured that out.  I would use an #18 gauge steel wire loop to hold the aluminum strip against the canister.

And I disagree with James a bit.  Down to 30 F, sure, an upright slows down but it’s still perfectly usable.  Maybe it takes an extra minute to heat up your coffee water.  25 F – it’ll run fine for 30 seconds, then evaporative cooling in the canister will cool it down.  Open the valve all the way.  It takes 6 or 8 minutes to heat up your coffee water rather the normal 3 minutes.  This assumes you have iso-butane, but almost all canisters are this.  N-butane is more common for household products, like some Asian stoves for kitchen use.

[Tipi Walter]

I have the lightest white gas stove made, I believe, called the MSR Simmerlite.  MSR in their crazy wisdom decided to discontinue this fine stove so I bought a new one to have in reserve.  It has served me well on long winter trips to -10F or below and even warms up the tent on occasion, depending on how much extra fuel I have left.

If I pull a standard 21 day January trip, I take around 44 ozs of white gas and almost always end up with extra fuel.  I could go with less white gas like 33 ozs but when conditions go south and it never gets above 0F, well, fuel consumption is enormous.  Plus, melting snow becomes a daily chore.

And plus when it’s very cold a neat technique is to store your liquid water from a creek right in your cooking pot and in the morning put the frozen water-pot right on the stove and boil it up for oats or tea.  In this way you don’t have to worry about your water jugs freezing solid.

I see no point in carrying numerous butane canisters and trying to encourage them to burn hot at 10 below, when white gas is perfect.  Plus, I see no point in carrying 4 or 5 empty canisters for the whole trip.

[Jerry Adams]

If you look at total weight including canisters, upright canister weighs less

When the temperature starts getting below 30 F, I can see the logic of inverted or white gas.  Every solution has complcations

Once you figure out a strip that works, it is very simple, more so than any other technique

You will recognize Tipi as the guy with no eyebrows.  And a huge heavy tent : )

[Anonymous]

As an alternative, one can also use alcohol down to very low temps, provided you keep it warm.  I’ve put the fuel bottle in my inner jacket pocket, and have used alcohol down to around 0 F*.  The well known hammocker, Shug, has used alcohol down to -40 F* or so.

The one major advantage of alcohol stoves at those more extreme temps, is that there is nothing to really break–they are about as simple as devices go. And if you have a titanium alcohol stove, they are quite robust.  I have damaged an aluminium one.  It was damaged during a flight where i checked my bag in–dented in a little.  It still works, but i don’t know if it’s lost any efficiency.

This winter, i plan to use my Kovea Spider, but with the hose connection point reinforced for “just in case”.  I’ve used it a few times this fall, and so far am quite happy with it, but the temps have not been that cold so far.

[Gary Dunckel]

“There’s a thread about turning canister upside down, putting water in the concave bottom, and put a plastic lid on it, then turn canister right side up and use it.  I keep looking for the right size lid.”

Here ya go, Jerry. A lid for a 110 gm. fuel canister. For ~$1, it comes with a usable cup and free cookies.

The lid fits perfectly on the bottom of the canister…

Then there’s the business of using a “Bob Moulder copper heat strip” setup to warm up the canister a little. I made these last spring when Bob first showed us his idea, but it was only now that it got cold enough to test them out.

This week, we had a couple of +10* F mornings, so I left the canister and BRS stove out overnight to get nice and cold. When I fired things up, the stove almost immediately became completely functional. I achieved  2-cup boils of +45* F water in my modified Jetboil pot with only slightly less efficiency than normal–5 minute boils using 5.0 grams of fuel. I purposely used Optimus fuel, mainly because it’s cheaper ($4) and because it has 50% n-butane (with 25% propane and 25% iso-butane). I figured if a fuel containing that much n-butane would work, then certainly MSR, SP, and JB fuels would since they don’t have any n-butane in them (supposedly). In my opinion, Bob’s idea certainly works.

Now, I’m hoping that we get a quick sub-zero spell soon so that I can truly put this system to the test. (after testing, I will then pray for global warming, to get my house back to normal temperatures)

(By the way, Bob, if you are following this thread–my copper strips are .021″ thick, and the photo above shows my original 1.125″ wide strips. Since then, I had my guy cut some strips into .75″ widths. In my testing this week, I didn’t see a functional difference between the two widths, so I think you were right about not needing them to be a full 1.0″ wide. Maybe if it was -10* F the wider strips would offer more heat, therefore better efficiency?).

 

[Bob Moulder]

Gary,

I’m glad you got a chance to do a good test and see for yourself.

I get the feeling that people who’ve seen/used other copper wire or metal strip arrangements can’t appreciate how well this set-up works. It really does solve the cold-weather canister conundrum.

My guess is that the slightly decreased efficiency you saw was probably due to convective heat loss which is to be expected when the ambient temperature is that low.

I think it would still work fine with a 0.75″ strip down to -10°F and probably well below that, however the coldest I’ve ever had a chance to test is -6°F (the coldest it got here last winter) and there was absolutely no problem. However, I’ve settled upon 1″ width @ 20mil thickness for the copper because it’s a common size.

With any size canister at any temperature, when new, or nearly new (with adequate propane remaining) they all work superbly without a cozy. When the fuel runs very low, it helps to have a cozy (especially with the larger canisters) because of increased cooling as the liquid fuel changes state, the increased empty space inside the canister, smaller amount of propane, and, with the greater surface area of the larger canisters, increased convective and radiant heat loss of the canister itself.

[Ralph Burgess]

Ok Bob, you’ve convinced me.   I was shying away from do anything like this at first, because I’m pretty much a novice, but it seems like a really neat solution if it works so well.   Off to Home Depot later.  I think I’ll pick up one of the MSR WindPro II invertible canister stoves too – both options are light, so I can take both out for security at first until I gain some expertise.   I can easily sell on the WindPro later.

I think I’m still going to learn how to use a white gas stove too, just to educate myself if nothing else.   Not sure if I’m likely be going out in temps low enough to warrant it this year, but it will be good to learn how to use it.   Again, although the MSR XGK-EX is expensive, it seems like it’s standard piece of kit that I could sell on, so I just picked on up with the 20% coupon at Backcountry.

[Jerry Adams]

hmmm…  Oreo Minis or Nutter Butter Bites…

[Cameron M]

Ralph, if you want a white gas stove, something less expensive like the MSR Whisperlite should work just fine for your purposes. Just don’t ever ever ever allow your wife to handle it.

[Bob Moulder]

Ralph, I think Gary convinced you. :^)

Please PM me if you have any trouble finding any of the bits.

After all the experimentation, I have extras of everything and can send them to you. Cozies are easy to make with any EVA foam, glued together with Welder or Weldwood contact cement.

I have heaps of experience with MSR WG stoves. If I could pass on one tip it would be to make certain to lubricate the end of the fuel tube, with oil, spit or nose grease, before inserting it into the pump, because if you scuff that o-ring you’re screwed, especially when it’s very cold… as anyone familiar with the “Challenger” disaster knows. And oil the pump cup. OK that’s 2 tips.

[Ralph Burgess]

Thanks Bob, most generous.  And thanks for the tip on the cement for EVA foam.

I’ll contemplate your thread more carefully, but I think most of this is within my tinkering capabilites.

“Just don’t ever ever ever allow your wife to handle it.”

But I assume that it would be quite suitable for my ex-wife, with no instruction whatsoever?

[Author]

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