I took the opportunity to test the moulder strip concept for heating canister stoves when the arctic air and snow settled in for a few days. I only use stoves for melting snow, not cooking, if that makes any difference.
After a lot of fiddling and trying different setups, I’m sticking to just putting the canister into a bath of water to keep it at high enough temp to vaporize into gasses.
Some reasons to this:
– My stove, the Windmaster, is pretty tall. The heat loss from the flame to the canister is pretty high. This forces me to heat the copper element a LOT hotter than I would like at the flame.
– If the copper is transferring enough heat to keep the canister warm, it is also creating a hot spot in the canister wall. While this is likely not at all anything to worry about, it does happen. Ideally, metal containment canisters should probably not have such massive temp deltas across the material. It can be bloody hot near the strip, and iced over on the other side.
– The copper will burn your hand or gloves. It’s worse on gloves, as you don’t feel it melting. And if the copper is too hot and needs to be backed away from the flames, it’s hard to grab it and bend it away without turning off the stove or removing the whole moulder strip. I melted my polypropylene liner gloves under my nitrile gloves touching the strip. Funny how the nitrile melting point is way higher than polypro, so it was fine, but liner under it melted. haha
– Since I have to put the moulder strip so far into my flame to get enough energy transfer, it disrupts the flame pattern quite a bit. Not sure if it does anything negative, but it does interrupt it quite a bit and changes the color of the flame as well.
– The moulder strips don’t alter well for different sized canisters, since the strip needs to reach the bottom of the canister. I had to make different setups for my different volume canisters. Water bath handles all canister sizes.
– Scully strips are way hotter than Mulder strips. ;)Â Â Â /s
