Originally Posted by
cyccommute
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.
I have to disagree; I am neither a chemist nor an engineer.
Originally Posted by
cyccommute
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.
Not so, you could burn the lower heat content fuel twice as fast and transfer heat at the same rate as the more heat dense fuel. I offered a cat-can stove I built that boiled a half liter of water in the same time as an Optimus canister fuel burner. Perhaps you didn’t see my entry and pictures.
Originally Posted by
cyccommute
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.
I am sure this is true, all things being equal, but it is my understanding that plutonium is a very energy dense fuel but it boils water very inefficiently. That is the closer the temperature of the heat source is to the desired temperature of the substance being heated the more efficient the heat transfer. Quite frankly I have no idea if the energy transfer potential between ethanol burning Trangia and say a kerosene burning Wisperlite International is enough to put a period between.
Originally Posted by
cyccommute
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.
But this is precisely the beauty of alcohol it is so readily available that in theory you might not have to carry any fuel at all. You just need to buy enough at the end of the day for dinner and breakfast. That’s assuming you don’t stop for high tea in the afternoon.
This leads to one of the prime reason I prefer ethanol as a stove fuel. It's a biofuel and renewable. I know biofuels are in their infancy and it is supposed to take one barrel of oil to produce 1.25 barrel equivalence of corn based ethanol energy. I can live with that with the fuel economy I get on my bicycle. I read MIT has developed a
biopropane and someday I may buy a green Pocket Rocket stove when one comes on the market.
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