Originally Posted by
Trevtassie
Fair enough , yeah, I stuffed up there should have said energy content for volume. They all have much different densities at room temperature.
When it comes to carrying the stuff the different densities mean that you need to carry more gas by weight, including the canisters to get the equivalent of gasoline. And way more alcohol than either gas or other liquid fuels. So if I have my one litre bottle of stove fuel, I can get a lot more energy out of gasoline than I could out of alcohol.
The weight of the canister is not much different from the weight of a fuel bottle. The few times I have used white gas, I found that they don't last as long as a "butane" (not butane but it's easier to type) canister. I boil water for coffee in the morning and I cook some kind or rice or pasta for dinner which have to simmer of some amount of time. I find that a canister lasts for most of a week.
I agree with you about alcohol but that's only because the energy density of alcohol is so low and the density of the liquid is so high. Alcohol requires a lot of volume to get the same energy out of the fuel as other kinds of fuels and it weighs more.
Originally Posted by
Trevtassie
The other downside was the gases poor performance when it's cold, especially if you get the cheap cartridges that have lots of propane. Butane is ok though. Though I did have a friend who had one of the liquid gas stoves with the horizontal cylinders, that worked well, but the cartridges cost a fortune and the weight was only slightly less than a liquid fuel stove.
This is only a problem if it's a problem. Bicycle touring really isn't that much of a cold weather sport. There are some people out there who may winter tour but I'm not too concerned about them or what fuel they use. Most people are going to use fuel for cooking in the summer where it really doesn't matter.
By the way, butane type fuels work very well here in Colorado because the pressure differential is great enough to allow the fuel to work well in the cold.
Originally Posted by
Trevtassie
And the CO issue is a very real one. I was a ranger on a long walking track with huts. Often when the huts filled with people cooking and breathing and the fire was lit the CO would build up and the oxygen level drop so much I couldn't get my jet lighter to go. Some of the huts the ventilation screens hadn't been cleaned for years. Some didn't have any fixed ventilation. So that got flagged as a serious OH&S issue. People didn't like having the window open because of the cold. I always wondered if one day I'd rock up to a hut and find it full of dead people after somebody left a stove on for heating. I think stopping that was all the people going in and out to the toilet, the door was the biggest source of ventilation.
Carbon monoxide is a very real problems but not for the reasons you have stated. If you had enough CO built up to cause the oxygen level to drop and your burner go out, you'd be long dead. 1600 ppm (0.16%) will make you sick as a dog in 20 minutes and dead in an hour. 6400 ppm (0.64%) will kill you in less than 20 minutes and 1.28% will kill in less than 3 minutes. There's 19% oxygen in air and, if there were too little oxygen in the air to keep a flame from igniting, you'd be dead from CO long before you reached the point where a flame is starved out.
That's actually one of the reasons that CO is so deadly. The flame can continue to burn and pump out CO for a long time before the flame will be starved of enough oxygen to go out.