The BRS-3000T. It's Light, But Is It Any Good?

Yeah, I pretty much agree. The BRS 3000T is light. And, it does perform reasonably well in sheltered conditions and it is cheap. This indicates that it will have a large body of users despite the wind, stability and design issues you found.

Personally, as a pretty much dedicated ultra-light hiker, I don’t think any topper stove is a serious tool. Of course, I often travel between one and three weeks at a time…not quite serious thru hiker distances/duration but still much longer than most. Toppers (canister top stoves) have some design issues as you state. They have some stability issues inherent to their design. And, they lack the capacity for serious wind/heat shields.

The design requires all the weight of the pot to be transferred down to a single ~3/8″ screw. Usually, this is mounted on some sort of rubber “O” ring. So, this can cause minor stability issues by the play between the threads and rubber gasket. The design causes the pot to sit very high. This yields greater angular displacement (off balance) of pots that are not set closer. Often as bad or worse than the old SVEA. The higher position of the burner means they are subject to greater winds. Wind velocity at ground level is usually much less than 3-4″ above ground. And, you cannot use a wind/heat screen without careful monitoring of the canister temp. The resulting loss of heat efficiency usually means consumption goes up to as much as 15g or more for two cups, of course 10g is usually more like it. To me, this is a terrible waste of fuel, since I can boil 1-2qts (~2liters) depending on starting temp with that same fuel, or, around 2-4x better fuel efficiency. Over a couple weeks, this really adds up in weight carried.

One of the things I found with the FMT-300t was that by bending the pot supports to a true perpendicular to the flame, it reduced the area of “red” on the pot support. I am not sure this will work on the BRS-3000T, and it would increase the size somewhat, but it will allow the main body of heat to bypass the pot support. A possible fix for the BRS, if someone can try this.

Excellent report.

I think it is a good back-up stove (almost as light as some repair kits for other stoves!) and perhaps appropriate for someone who’s going to be out for only a few nights and can use a wood fire or no-cook as a back-up if the stove fails.

Agreed, the largest vessel I put on mine is a MSR Titan or JB MiniMo. Ditto, don’t run it full blast for a long time and shelter it really well from wind.

@jamesdmarco

James, that’s an interesting idea, bending the pot supports such that they absorb less flame.  I’m not sure that would work in this case, but I suppose I have nothing to lose given that the stove has already failed.

I’m considering bending the pot support back in place and trying another longish burn to see if the failure repeats — but this time with no wind.  I’m pretty sure that without the wind concentrating the heat on the pot support there won’t be a repeat.

HJ

@bobmny10562

Bob, thank you.  Yeah, I’m pretty darned sure that the big issue here was how the wind concentrated the flame on the pot support.

Clearly though, one would really want to think carefully if they observed a boil running long.  You don’t want to run this stove for a long time.  If enough heat energy is directed into a pot support, deformation can result, as my experience shows.

HJ

for what its for … boiling a cup or two of water … the stove works absolutely fine

just use a foil windscreen if one is worried, or if possible boil in the vestibule/under yr tarp

nothing is as compact and light … especially for the price, literally a fraction of the cost of a “name brand” one

ive said it years ago that these chinese stoves (and BPL had an article about it years ago) are a game changer in terms of price and lowering the cost of UL … and this is before the BRS 3000T

;)

I enjoy and appreciate your blog Jim, and rate the tests,  but surely this time the test was overkill for the poor little thing!

Really, I think this stove is for small pots and not much over 2 cups of water.

No windshield ( so extending boil time unnecessarily )  plus a 1.3l pan with 3+cups of water plus noodles is just overloading it.

Just looking at one, you can see it’s build is not that strong. Common sense should prevail. The right size tool for the job?

Granted, it should have a caveat on the packaging, but really it’s only a cup boiler in my experience.

Several comments on your blog indicate if used appropriately it is reliable?

Cheers

Worst-case testing is useful IMO because there are people ‘out there’ who do just this sort of thing. I’d rather see Hikin’ Jim blow it up/melt it down/whatever just to discover the failure modes and to reassure  more reasonable and knowledgeable folk that if used appropriately it’s a pretty good little stove.

I can’t find the link using BPL’s amazing search function ///full sarc, if it isn’t obvious///, but if IIRC there was a discussion some time back where a user reported a problem with this stove when cooking (or trying to cook) with a huge pot and dinner combo that weighed something like 3 kg. While most of us would instantly rule this idea ludicrous, there was somebody actually grossly abusing the stove this way.

Jim, Yeah, the pot supports should be rather soft by now. A full windscreen would help, but, as you know, careful monitoring of the can temp is needed. Anyway, you don’t have anything to loose.

I usually hike solo on long duration hikes. I always just boil water in the morning: Marco’s Mud (coffee, Oatmeal, Cocoa,) and a couple cups of Mocha. At night, I usually cook a meal and have cocoa. Each burn means ~28-30oz of water (a pretty full pot.) The weight and rough terrain of the ADK’s precludes most toppers.

Good point Bob.

There are always people who push the limits for good or ill!

I think I’m concerned is that Jim’s review writes the stove off, based on a test that was maybe inappropriate for it’s abilities.

Another test using say, a windshield and a 500-700ml mug shaped pot might be more apposite for a stove like that.

Don’t get distracted by the pot size or the number of cups of water.  This is a wind and design issue.   I’m pretty sure that I would have had similar results with a 600 ml pot with two cups instead of three.

The creep deformation here was caused by the wind concentrating the heat all on one pot support.  Again, I am pretty sure that this could happen with two cups in a smaller pot.  In fact, I’d like to test just that.

(By the way, since when is three cups excessive?  2 cups meal + 1 cup tea = 3 cups.  I would think 3 cups is a pretty common boil amount, even for UL’ers.)

Should you write off the stove based on my review?  Well, frankly, if it were me, I’d get a FMS-300T and pay the lousy 20 g weight penalty.  The 3000T is an inferior knock off of the 300T.

However, that said, with the 300T, you should be all right so long as you are diligent about sheltering the stove from wind.  If nothing else, I hope my review drives home the need for sheltering this stove from wind.  I also hope that my review will make people think.  It’s not all wine and roses with this stove.

The real story here is not one of pot support failure but one of a stove with unusually poor performance in wind.  The grams you save in stove weight may well be burned in fuel weight.

A twenty gram weight advantage is not all that difficult to overcome on a trip of say a week.  If one boils twice a day, that’s something like 12 to 14 boils.  If the 3000T uses about 1.5 g of fuel per boil more than the 300T, then the weight savings are gone.  Even if the difference were only 0.75 g per boil, you’re now talking about an overall weight differential of just 10 g.

HJ

Should you write off the stove based on my review? Well, frankly, if it were me, I’d get a FMS-300T and pay the lousy 20 g weight penalty. The 3000T is an inferior knock off of the 300T.

Good advice. You get what you pay for.

There is actually more differences than just the price between the two stoves (300T and 3000T.) The flame pattern with the 300T is much more concentrated to the center. As R. Caffin pointed out, it is a quasi-vortex stove, with only small air input jets with the pot actually completing the vortex’ flame spreader, thus forcing heat out along the bottom of a pot in a thinner film than the 3000T. The 3000T has a much cheaper stamped, steel flame distribution system forcing the flame out from the burner in a wider/thicker pattern with some loss of inherent efficiency. With normal butane/isobutane/propane mixes in canisters, the efficiency loss is minor. But the flame thickness as it impinges on the pot supports can be a problem, especially in a wind, as Jim has shown. While this can be ignored in most cases, when you are a few days from civilization and the stove won’t support your pot with food in it, it will be more than an annoyance. I agree with Jim’s assessment.

then you just hold the pot by the handle (you didnt cut off those did you) for the 4 minutes r so it takes to boil the water at full blast … and you were using it at full blast to melt those supports werent you =P

or you can simply use a windscreen like you should anyways with any of those kind of stoves in the wind … and boil water at less than full blast for efficiency ….

jim has shown that this type of failure can occur … and thats useful to know

however this stove has been out and known in the UL community for well over 2 years now (which has the first BPL spotlight review on it) … and has been used by quite a few folks in real world conditions, some for quite a long time …

and while there may have been an  instance here or there of pot support bending (sometimes more related to too heavy a pot) … they arent exactly failing all over the place

at least not like the jetboil sol TIs

put it this way … i dont take cuben packs rock climbing and expect em to last as long despite the marginal weight savings (well outdoorgearlab did and surprise surprise the fabric was showing pretty high wear)

;)

“a huge pot and dinner combo that weighed something like 3 kg. . . . most of us would instantly rule this idea ludicrous”

Jim,

Good write up.  Every piece of backpacking gear has a place or value.  I own a couple BRS-3000T’s and they are ok.  I agree that the stove is more sensitive to the wind, that being said, all stoves need a windscreen for optimal fuel efficiency,  Speaking of fuel efficiency, from what I found on the internet, the BRS-3000T is not great at fuel efficiency.  The numbers I see are ~9 grams to boil 2 cups compared to 5-6 for the better systems.

I tend to agree with most people that the stove will work fine for smaller volumes (<700 ml) in calm conditions (or used with a windscreen).  It’s cheap and it’s small and probably be good for weekend trips.

I wouldn’t use it for snow melting, larger volumes and in windy conditions.  On longer hikes, I suspect that the fuel efficiency may be an issue.

My 2 cents

“Don’t get distracted by the pot size or the number of cups of water.  This is a wind and design issue.   I’m pretty sure that I would have had similar results with a 600 ml pot with two cups instead of three.”

I agree with Jim’s assessment on this given that in his testing, he wasn’t getting the water to boil for 10 minutes.  A smaller pot, less water to heat, less surface (sides and water surface) losing heat – yeah, it would boil faster, maybe before noticeable creep.  But with a somewhat stronger wind?  You’d be back to a long boil time even with a small volume pot.  And while a smaller pot weighs less so it puts less force on those pot supports, if the pot support gets hot enough for any creep, then the combined effects over multiple boils could add up.

I’ve used the BRS-3000T on some pretty big pots.  1.5 to 3-liter pots on family and group trips including a fair bit of snow melting.  I’ve been really careful to place the canister on a very solid, very flat surface and to perfectly center the pot on the burner.  And my bigger pots are HX pots, so they get the job done sooner and maybe those HX fins provide a little wind protection.  Mostly, I haven’t used it in moderate or high winds.

Now I’m rethinking it – I may need a new go-to canister stove.  One benefit would be that I’d let more people (like the kids) use a lower, more stable stove.  At 25 grams, I’d still bring the BRS on a large-group trip as (1) a backup and (2) a second burner.

I have been using a BRS-3000T a lot for nearly 2 years now. I use it almost exclusively with either a Jetboil Sol or MiniMo pot. Last week I did the last of my snow melt tests to get my technique dialed in. I would do 18-20 minute continuous burn times and a medium-low flame setting to get 2 liters of water from the snow. I used my JB MiniMo with the pot riser ‘thingy’. Then I would shut the stove off and weigh the canister. It consistently consumed ~16 gm of fuel to do the 2 liters of melt water, which I think is pretty good efficiency. There was minimal to no breeze when I did these tests, and ambient was between 25-40* F. All in all, I did 3 gallons of snow melt.

As an aside this was my technique: I placed a wee pinch of alum in a 2-quart juice bottle (very sturdy, but it weighs 2.5 oz.), and then I placed a bug net strainer device (thanks, David) to catch any pine needles, dead spiders, or mouse poop. I poured the snow melt into the bottle and put more snow into the pot–repeat, repeat, repeat…

When the bottle was full and the stove was shut off, I screwed the cap back onto the bottle and shook it to fully utilize the alum to neutralize the dust that made it through the bug net strainer. I let it sit for 20-30 minutes to settle the dust. I then slowly poured the water into another similar juice bottle which had a paper K-cup filter secured to the opening. It took about 3 minutes to get the 2 liters filtered this way, but you wouldn’t believe how much fine black dust had remained in the strained water. It filtered pretty fast at first, slowing way down as the filter paper got more and more clogged.

I know that macho winter alpine climbers have for decades ignored this dust (as have I), and no one has died from ingesting it (so we think). But just what IS this dust, anyway? Of course every snowflake forms around a tiny speck of dust. But I can imagine that the dust could possibly be remnants of a past forest fire somewhere, which has been floating about in the atmosphere for maybe decades. No problem there. But what about extant poisonous pollution from the Mt. St. Helen eruption, or worse, fallout from the nuclear meltdowns of Japan and Chernobyl? I know that I’ve been overthinking this, but my geeky goal here was to find a way to get the cleanest water from snow melt possible.

So back to the BRS-3000T. With my JB pot riser disk, I have consistently been able to do a 2-cup boil consuming between 4.0 and 5.0 grams of fuel depending on whether there is a slight breeze or none at all. This is of course due to the efficiency of the JB HX fins. I am sure that the BRS has its limitations, but I haven’t seen them with my routine use for boiling water. I also have been pretty impresssed with its snow melting capability.

But thanks for your initial post, Jim, as it shows us what could happen if the little guy gets abused.

one interesting thing is that BPL usually goes gaga over things that are (sometimes marginally) lighter … somewhat more fragile … and cost quite a bit more … and generally BPLer accept the reduction in durability (cuben anyone?)

here we have a product that while perhaps a bit more fragile, is % wise significantly lighter (and smaller) than many stoves … yet is MUCH cheaper

BRS3000Ts are going for 10 yankee dollahz on gear best (or 15-20$ on amazon if you want the 30 day warranty) right now … you simply cannot find any other decent canister stove at even twice the weight for that much …

perhaps if the 3000T cost twice as much as a primus/msr/snowpeak and had a special “ultralight” in its name with fancy material names … then it would be more acceptable?

;)

@bearbreeder

for what its for … boiling a cup or two of water … the stove works absolutely fine

Well, that is exactly what I was trying to do… well, three cups, but whatever.  But this is not an issue of 2 cups, good, three cups bad.  This is an issue of wind and design.  It isn’t the best design.  This morning, I bent the pot support back — with my fingers.  The word “robust” isn’t exactly a good fit for this stove.

That said, probably most people will be fine with it provided that they shield it from wind.  If the wind is allowed to direct the flame on to one pot support as it did with mine, a failure (clearly) could result.

nothing is as compact and light … especially for the price, literally a fraction of the cost of a “name brand” one

You got me there.  No argument.

HJ

Good write up.

Thank you, Jon

I agree that the stove is more sensitive to the wind, that being said, all stoves need a windscreen for optimal fuel efficiency,  Speaking of fuel efficiency, from what I found on the internet, the BRS-3000T is not great at fuel efficiency.  The numbers I see are ~9 grams to boil 2 cups compared to 5-6 for the better systems.

Yeah, and I was conscious of not having a windscreen.  I had heard that the BRS-3000T was below average in wind, so I thought I’d see how long it took to boil water.  I learned more than I had planned on.  ;)

I tend to agree with most people that the stove will work fine for smaller volumes (<700 ml) in calm conditions (or used with a windscreen).

I think so.  You just have to really watch it with wind.

It’s cheap and it’s small and probably be good for weekend trips.  I wouldn’t use it for snow melting, larger volumes and in windy conditions.  On longer hikes, I suspect that the fuel efficiency may be an issue.

I too suspect that for longer trips the fuel efficiency issue may become a problem.  You can sort of think of this stove as the “Anti-Jetboil”.  As efficient as a Jetboil is, this stove is that inefficient.  It’s probably the least efficient gas stove in my arsenal still in production.  The old Gerry Infrared probably has it beat if you can believe it, but not by much.

HJ

I agree with Jim’s assessment on this given that in his testing, he wasn’t getting the water to boil for 10 minutes.  A smaller pot, less water to heat, less surface (sides and water surface) losing heat – yeah, it would boil faster, maybe before noticeable creep.  But with a somewhat stronger wind?  You’d be back to a long boil time even with a small volume pot.

This was a bit of an odd conjunction of circumstances.  The wind focusing the flame on a particular pot support, an extended boil, and me turning up the stove because the danged thing just wouldn’t boil (best I got was a simmer).  BUT two other people have told me that they’ve had bent pot supports.  So, while it won’t happen to everyone neither is it a fluke, one time thing.

And while a smaller pot weighs less so it puts less force on those pot supports, if the pot support gets hot enough for any creep, then the combined effects over multiple boils could add up.

Now, that’s what I’ve been asking myself, “what are the long term effects?”  I think that over time that creep deformation/failure indeed might happen.  It’s cheap enough to treat it as a disposable stove (anyone concerned with the environment didn’t hear me just say that), :)  but a bit inconvenient if it happens while you’re out.  I don’t think I’d take it deep in the backcountry days away from any trailhead, but maybe that’s just me.

HJ

@Gary… good tests!

Filtered or not, melted snow has that funny, sterile taste since its mineral content is very low… and perhaps other reasons somebody else will know about.

The most efficient canister burn I ever got was with the MiniMo pot with your Thingy and the BRS running at roughly 60-65% of max, wind absent, boiling 3 cups of approx 50°F (IIRC) water using 6.3g of fuel. Not a stretch to extrapolate 8.4g for a liter, which is superb. I have also considered the possibility that the Thingy better channels heat to the HX fins and makes them even more efficient, but I have not done controlled tests with and without the Thingy. (And then there’s the additional question of the position of the stove’s pot supports, whether resting on the pot bottom between the HX fins or perched on the bottom of the fins for the ‘non-Thingy’ testing.)

@Eric… lol good point about how a higher price might affect its appeal. I’ll continue to use it anyway as I normally would, when it’s cold but not being used primarily for snow melting.

Last week I did the last of my snow melt tests to get my technique dialed in. I would do 18-20 minute continuous burn times and a medium-low flame setting to get 2 liters of water from the snow.  All in all, I did 3 gallons of snow melt.

Ah.  Thank you for that.  That is really good information.  If you can do 18 – 20 minute continuous burns, then the duration of my burn wasn’t the issue — which is what I suspected.  The wind was the issue.  Absent the wind, I think I would have been fine.

So back to the BRS-3000T. With my JB pot riser disk, I have consistently been able to do a 2-cup boil consuming between 4.0 and 5.0 grams of fuel depending on whether there is a slight breeze or none at all. This is of course due to the efficiency of the JB HX fins. I am sure that the BRS has its limitations, but I haven’t seen them with my routine use for boiling water. I also have been pretty impresssed with its snow melting capability.

That’s excellent efficiency.

But thanks for your initial post, Jim, as it shows us what could happen if the little guy gets abused.

I think I’m going to push back a little bit on the word “abused.”  If you can do three gallons of snow melting with 18 – 20 minute burns, there’s no way my three cups of already liquid water with a 10 minute burn was an abuse of the stove.  The BRS-3000T just doesn’t do well in wind in general and in particular has this vulnerability that if the wind is allowed to direct the flame to one pot support, the pot support can fail.

HJ

I completely support and enjoy all forms of esoteric gear discussions on BPL. However the main point of poor wind performance seems a bit of a straw man here. I assume that good wind protection is a basic UL presumption for using any stove. I have enjoyed and been spoiled by this small stove and the ability to get at least 16 boils on a longer trip, besting Esbit efficiency.