Originally Posted by
andrewclaus
A hiker I met used
this stuff in his alky stove. I've never tried it but it may be another option in some areas. He said it was amazingly simple to find in most of the US and I imagine Canada too.
I'm not sure which of the wide variety of products the guy was using but most of them wouldn't work...they are water based...or they would burn too hot and, oddly enough, too cold for the common alcohol stove design. I would suspect that he was using something that was mineral spirits based. I've tired mineral spirits in a pop can design and it wasn't pretty. The fuel heats up the stove and starts to melt the adhesive on the furnace tape used to hold the stove together. That's the too hot part. But the fuel burned with a very yellow flame and an incredible amount of soot. That's the too cold part. It burns very inefficiently when burned in a pool. It needs the pressure and air mixing of pressurized stoves to burn properly.