Originally Posted by
staehpj1
Those look interesting. I can see a number of advantages over my old Pocket Rocket and a couple small disadvantages.
How easily available are the cheap butane cartridges when on the road? I know they are used by the food service industry and often sold by the 12 pack. Are they an every Walmart and Target kind of item? Can you easily find singles? Is the tare weight much more than the usual MSR and Jet Boil type canisters of a similar size? The 8oz. size is more than I'd typically carry on tour at a time, but it would mean not needing to buy fuel too frequently. It would last quite a lot longer than a 12oz. bottle of yellow Heet which is my usual fuel on tour. That is in part because butane has more btus per weight than alcohol and in part because there is more waste with alcohol due to having to guess how full to fill the stove for a cook inevitably leaving excess to burn off.
The cartridges are pretty well everywhere, haven't tried anywhere really remote like Mongolia, but I bet they are there too. Weight wise empty they are about the same as a 220g canister. Cost is usually the big winner. It's sometimes way cheaper to buy a 4 pack and leave a couple behind than to buy a normal canister, example, here in Australia you can buy 4 cartridges for A$5.20 or about US$3.50 from the hardware stores compared with anything up to $10 for a 220g canister. In Japan you can get a single cartridge for 108Yen, or about US$1. I found them most places in Europe. I'd expect they'd be around in the US as well, I haven't looked there, I used a MSR Dragonfly for our trip. I just looked and found some online in the US at a kitchen supply store for $1.50 each though. Either way you can usually find either cartridges or canisters, but because you can feed liquid gas with a preheat tube you can use the cheapest canisters even when it's cold.