Originally Posted by
Erick L
I understand your mumbo-jumbo. What you don't understand is how it's irrelevant to bike touring. When questionned on experience, you mention lab work and playing with cat stoves at home (yet wonder how people see how much fuel is left?). You don't like alcool stoves? Fine. Others have extensive field experience with other types of fuel and still prefer alcool so maybe there's something to it and you should tone down your crusades against things you have little to no field experience with. Here are a few other things that are relevent to bike touring:
- Cost: one decent punch makes thousands of alcool stoves.
- Weight: almost nothing.
- Size: smaller than anything else.
- Simple and reliable, no moving parts.
- Fuel found in gas station, auto store and/or hardware store. Canisters need a store with a less common "sporting goods" label. Those stores also have shorter opening hours.
- Silent. After a day of noisy cars, a canister/naphta stove is just another annoying engine. The quiet blue-flamed alcool stove is relaxing. you can't test that over the kitchen counter.
- The joy of making a stove out of a freakin' tuna can.
- Makes a good fire starter.
I had a MSR Dragonfly pump fail on the first day of a trip. I tried to fix it, tried to find a pump in a good size town but no luck. I did found a cat stove that I forgot in my stuff. They're that small and light. I used it for the rest of the trip.
This year, I brought both a canister and cat stoves. I used the canister stoves at first because yes, it's easy to use. Then I got in a town and the sporting good store was close. In the next town, a hardware store only had poke-through canisters but did have alcool. I switched stoves and told them to get screw-on canisters instead. The funny thing is when I used the canister stove, the tuna can was just a thing in my cookset. When I switched to the cat stove, the canister stove was an annoying thing in my cookset that served no purpose. I tried NOT to use a cat stove but it keeps coming back. BTUs don't say anything about that.
Fine, you like the simplicity and making something. I have zero problem with that. However my 'technical mumbo jumbo' isn't addressed at the simplicity of commercial or the homemade qualities of can stoves. My 'technical mumbo jumbo' addresses the wild claims made by others about the effectiveness of the fuel...and that
is applicable to bicycle touring. You can claim all you want that the stove heat just as well as a pressurized fuel stove but you would be absolutely and totally wrong. We know through science...you know that 'technical mumbo jumbo'...what the heat content of various fuels are. We use stoves to heat things so heat output is an important quality of the stoves. If you have a fuel that contains twice as much heat as another fuel, you can heat things twice as fast. On the other hand, if a fuel has half the heat content of another fuel it takes twice the fuel to heat something to the same temperature. Once you have to carry twice the fuel to do the same job, it adds up. Sure, you could carry the same amount of fuel and just refuel more often but you are just trading one problem for another.