Originally Posted by
zeppinger
Maybe one day they will come out with a stove that runs on plutonium that has an even higher heat output per gram of fuel!
Just kidding of course. High output and fuel density are not the only criteria for a good stove. There is reliability, ease of use, pleasure of use (no jet noises), ect...
I prefer to carry extra alcohol rather than an expensive stove with a bunch of stuff that cold go wrong. True that is more flammable chemicals to have on the bike, though not very much more, but alcohol is not explosive in the same way that gasoline or butane is. If you were to spill some alcohol on say, your clothes or in your panniers, it would evaporate and leave little trace of smell. Try that with petrol!
You'd have to search far and wide to find a stove that is unreliable and hard to use. I've used butane stoves, liquid fuel and even toyed with pop can stoves. Of the three, the pop can is what I'd call the most unreliable...and dangerous. First there's you have to judge how much fuel you are going to need. If you judge wrong and end up with too much fuel which you either have to burn off (waste it) or you have to cool it and pour it back in the bottle...probably wasting almost as much as if you just burned it off. If you judge wrong and end up with too little fuel, you are really in a bad spot. Pouring volatile liquids into hot stoves places you in danger of a real explosion. You have a cloud of vapor hanging around a hot stove and you are going to try to reignite the stove. At the very least you could end up with singed hair. At the very most...
Pressurized liquid fuel stoves are slightly hazardous because you have to preheat the fuel to vaporize it. This means you have a small pool of burning fuel for about a minute before the stove can really start to burn. But the pool of fuel is small - <5 ml - while the main body of the fuel is safely contained. Fuel addition to the stove during burning is controlled and the possibility of a spill while the stove is hot is almost zero...although if one were determined, you
could unscrew the pump and pour the liquid all over.
Butane can be explosive but 8 oz of gas isn't going to pose too much of an explosion risk because the gas dissipates quickly. And, as with the pressurized liquid fuel stove, you'd have to be very determined to cause yourself harm.
I don't use gasoline in liquid fuel stoves because I know the dangers of gasoline. I'd use other fuels long before I'd use gasoline...including a wood fire. Just the hazard of putting gasoline in a MSR fuel bottle is enough to give me the willies. The fuels I would use...naphtha, white gas, mineral spirits, etc...have a higher flash point than gasoline and are safer. They also evaporate cleanly if you do spill them and won't leave any more residual odor than any alcohol.