I had commented in the StoveBench initial report that I hope we can try to use the results to help users evaluate their <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>stove efficiency in relation to the weight of their cooking rig</span> (as it doesn’t help to carry a Coleman 2-burner car-camping stove into the wilderness just because it has a great F value.)
I’ve been fascinated with the idea if shedding the weight of the fuel container since the days when we used the Coleman PowerMax fuel and Xtreme stoves, so I got my hands on one of Roger C’s stoves secondhand here on BPL and started tinkering. My current usual cooking rig I’ve been fine-tuning this past two years — A. Evernew ECA278 750ml pot, mod’d by removing one handle, substituting the stock lid with a MYOG Ti foil lid with carbon felt top-cozy; B. FlatCatGear Snow Leopard windscreen (mod’d to be a fitted pot skirt that snugly stays on the pot on or off the stove); C. A Caffin Winter Stove with the FMS-300T head (modded per Jan Rezac and James Klein’s mod’s and comments to allow use of Ronson/Zippo IsoButane canisters). [BTW – I know the StoveBench protocol states that it should not include a windscreen, but this is my rig and that’s what I wanted to test….So take it for what it’s worth to you.]
I ran a home StoveBench test of the above system/rig. The StoveBench “F” value I calculated for 500ml of 3.55 degrees C water to boiling at 94.4 degrees C using Ronson IsoButane is 1.31. Not bad.
Once I got that test done, I decided to play with some weight measurement numbers and calculation ideas to see if a meaningful number or value might be simply derived. Again, this is so people can use the F value to determine a relationship between efficiency and weight of their own cooking gear to determine how to fine-tune it to be the lightest efficient weight.
I think the fuel container should be included in the weight amount for cooking system analysis. The above pot, skirt and stove is 180 grams. I used the larger Ronson canister which is the “165 g net wt” size – which has a fuel weight of 165 g and a canister weight of 49 g. So the total system weight is 229 g. Using “F / system weight” here produces 1.31/229 = 0.00527. Kind of an oddball number to throw around. But if you tune that to “F / system weight in kilograms” it turns into 5.72. That looks okay.
I extrapolated my test F value to see how it would be if I had used an MSR IsoPro canister instead. With the same pot/skirt/stove but using a 110g MSR canister (@ 101g dry), the system weight is now 281 grams. The F/system number for that combination is 4.66. Using a 227g canister (@ 147 g dry) this combination comes out to 4.01. If I was going on a 2-night trip I could get by with the Ronson/Zippo small canister – 42 g net wt @ 25g dry – and come up with an F/ system weight number of 6.82. So — a higher number is harnessing the lowest weight at the higher efficiencies; and the lower numbers mean the F is either not high enough for the weight -or- the weight is spoiling using a high F stove.
I did this calculation and analysis mostly just for me so I could compare and see if the use of this unusual stove/fuel combo is actually efficient. But I thought I’d share as well.
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