What is the ultralight siphon system?

One of the remote stoves from Minibull designs maybe?

When we got to Japan, I had a significant issue. I didn't know what the label was for meths or denatured alcohol was. And we couldn't find anything that looked and smelled right in the paint section of two hardware shops we visited.

I ended up wandering through a pharmacy findiing likely bottles for rubbing alcohol, removing the tops where possible and sniffing. Machka ended up walking down to the other end of the pharmacy. I eventually found something that had the right smell, but was well diluted with water. It worked enough to cook a couple of meals, but the water content made it difficult to keep alight.

Next time we go, I will definitely find out what the Japanese characters and words are.

Maybe I would have been better of getting hold of a bottle of overproof saki... ;)

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.

No, that is not what he said. He said it will make you go blind. I added the 'dead' part. And "denatured alcohol" is really ethanol that has been adulterated to make it undrinkable. Methanol is but one of many, many ways that it is 'denatured'. It is also the crudest way. You could still drink it and not know that you had ingested deadly materials until you were, well, dead. Other compounds are often added that give the denatured alcohol a foul taste to keep anyone from drinking even a small amount of it.

To continue the technical mumbo jumbo, the problem with Everclear or 190 proof spirits of any kind is the water content. Adding 5% water to the mix decreases the energy available significantly. 200 proof ethanol...which isn't readily available...has around 12,000 BTU/lb. 190 proof ethanol has around 10,000 BTU/lb. All of the energy goes into volatilizing the water. Everclear is also not cheap.

My daughter brought back some for a small distillery in Mexico. I don't know what brand it is and I think it's long gone...she had it.

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.

Heet is a methanol product. It contains 99% methanol with 1% of a proprietary additive. As I've stated above, ethanol...the "alcohol" that most people are familiar with...can be denatured in a variety of ways that may, or may not, add toxicity to the liquid.

Thank you for broaching the subject. I wasn't really wanting to go there because of the complaining about 'technical mumbo jumbo' but you are correct.

I'm not sure why my link stopped working, but it was supposed to link to a windshield washer concentrate which supposedly is alcohol-based.

In answer to an earlier question here is a link with photos of sources of methanol/ethanol in many countries.

http://www.mark-ju.net/juliette/meths.htm

A second link describes international fuel names:

http://fuel.papo-art.com/

If going for over two weeks I will take a canister(sno peak giga is my current favorite) and a pepsi can stove. My reasoning is that if I want to make tea every morning one bottle of heet will last me over a week. And most of my meals are one pot boiling water efforts with fuel saved by using the insulate and soak method.
But sometimes I want to do a little more elaborate meal, so will use both, one to cook the rice, another for vegy/sauce/whatever. Or, sometimes it is to windy to use the pepsi stove. They do have some limitations even with a windscreen. Doing it this way means I save a cannister for a loooong time. On a shorter trip I take whichever I feel like.

I have also used wood, a swiss army engineers stove. smokey but it works.

Once in the spirit of inquiry I tried making a preheated dual chamber alchohol stove. I feel that it has some potential, but I need to make it out of beefier materials, as it melted itself, part of the pot, and puddled a lot of aluminium over some high duty firebrick.

as I say to all my engineer friends, sure, it works in practice, but can you overthink it and give it to many moving parts on the bench?

This depends on the Heet product. The yellow bottle contains methanol. The red bottle contains isoproponal plus additives. That's from the Gold Eagle website.

Contrary to recent advice in another thread, it seems that the red Heet is in fact the most suitable for use in alcohol stoves.

You still don't get it do you?

Many of us aren't interested in heating things twice as fast as with another fuel source. Do you cook at home with your stove's hotplates/burners turned up to the maximum, all the time?

The fact that we might carry around another half pound of fuel for a given period doesn't make a jot of difference, when we are happy with the fuel source, its performance, its smell, its availability, its safety, and a number of other factors... like you're happy with whatever fuel source you choose to do your camp cooking.

The OP has made a choice. Why don't you just leave it at that?

Isobutane/propane fuel has twice the Joules/Kg as ethanol, but I find the stoves and the canisters to be bulky and inconvenient and I also don't like having to rely on fairly specialized stores for resupply, I know I can find denatured alcohol, Heet or in a pinch propan-2-ol (sorry for the mumbo jumbo there, but we seem to be splitting nomenclature hairs here so I thought I'd just emphasize the double OH in rubbing alcohol that gets lost by some even when you say isopropanol). I also don't worry about boil times as I've found that using a small well directed set of flames uses the least fuel to boil my water. Energy density is only one factor on the efficiency of a stove. Once it's lit energy transfer is everything and you've also got to consider flame patters, the cooking vessel and wind screen. I also use a 2 cup mug as my cooking "pot" so a gentle flame that stays on the base of the mug is ideal so no flames are wasted by going beyond the base and so that the mug handles stay cool. I boil 2 cups of water this way in about 5 mins on a warm day, 7mins if it's cold and use 15 ml of ethanol. It works for me, but I'm sure canisters are perfectly good at heating stuff up too.

I have to disagree; I am neither a chemist nor an engineer.

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.


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.

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.:D:

I don't know to what thread you are referring, but the red-bottled HEET is isopropyl alcohol and will leave a nasty black soot on you pot/mug.
The yellow-bottled HEET is 90-something percent methanol and burns much cleaner. :)

I've tried both and the yellow Heet bottle is best. The red Heet creates lots of soot and tends to clog Trangia stoves.

The use of a light alcohol stove saves weight as long as you only need to carry smallish amounts of fuel. On a bike tour I typically carry only small amounts of fuel and restock often. So weight wise it is the way to go for that application.

The use of butane or other fuel with a greater energy to weight ratio saves weight if you must carry larger amounts of fuel. That can be a big help if counting grams on a trip with weeks between restocking opportunities.

That said both work fine and the weight differences are not enough to worry most tourists since the majority of them are not gram counters. That leaves the choice to be based the other characteristics for most tourists.

Very well put. For me the choice of an alcohol stove comes down to the ease of fuel resupply and the light weight and small volume. A canister stove (all things being equal) will boil twice as much water per oz of fuel as a stove burning ethanol. I'd use a canister stove if I needed to cook for more than one or if I thought I would be away from resupply for more than a week.

Windshield washer fluid contains some methanol but it also contains a lot of water. It also contains ammonium hydroxide. The water content, 40 to 70%, would make a poor fuel into a very poor fuel. The ammonium hydroxide wouldn't burn at all but would very quickly corrode aluminum parts. A very, very poor choice for fuel.

Although I didn't know that there were two HEET products, "Heet" is the methanol product and isoHEET is the 2-propanol product. I try not to use the class name for materials in the interest of clarity and will differentiate between them in the future.

There is a reason for this. Isopropanol, aka 2-propanol, has a lower vapor pressure than methanol and ethanol. Since the open burn stoves like the Trangia work by burning the evaporating fuel that mixes with air, they need a high vapor pressure fuel. Isopropanol would work better in a system that atomizes the fuel and mixes it with air like a pressurized fuel stove. I would suggest, however, that no one not do that. It could be very dangerous as the fuel/air mixture would not be optimal with current jets.

What do you not get? Do you cook with your stove at home turned down to minimum all the time? All you guys seem to be trying to convince me that the fuel you use is the best fuel on the planet and performs just as well as my fuel choice. I fully acknowledge the short comings of my fuel choice. Availability of butane mixture canisters is limited but they aren't as limited in the US (where I do most of my touring so that's where I'm most concerned about fuel availability) because a major retailer has decided to carry them. Considering that this major retailer is far too prevalent throughout the US...another topic:rolleyes:...I've had no issues in the last 3 or 4 years finding my fuel choice.

I acknowledge that my stove of choice comes with some possible safety issues, but I have never heard of anyone having problems with these fuels when used according to manufacturers instruction.

I acknowledge that the canister or pressurized liquid fuel stoves are heavier.

Now, are you willing to acknowledge alcohol fuel's shortcomings? That pound for pound it has half the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels? That you have to use more of it to do the same thing? That the heat output from it is less than the heat output from hydrocarbon fuels? That you have to refuel more often because you use so much more of it? That you are limited to a very specific range of fuels...ethanol and methanol...to avoid soot and stove clogging? That an open burning liquid fuel has more chance of getting away from the user then a contained, metered fuel?

2-propanol is the accepted IUPAC name. It has a single hydroxyl group (-OH), not a double one. Since the hydroxyl group is the 'functional' group in the compound, an ending of -"ol" is added to the alkane's name and the position of the hydroxyl group is noted relative to the terminal carbon of the chain.

If the compound had a double hydroxyl group it would be called a diol and would not burn at under "normal" conditions. You'd need a high temperature, well past what you can get from a campstove.

Thank you for posting realistic heating times. These times are well within what I would expect for comparison to hydrocarbon fuels with a much higher heat content.

Post all you want. But you are starting to fall on deaf ears, I'm afraid, because nothing you have posted has been strong enough to convince me and others that there is no merit in alcohol stoves. Not even your old saw of fuel efficiency.

Or is it that you just want the last word, as in so many other previous threads?

Are you taking into account the number and weight of the containers required for butane and other fuels? Plus the inconvenience of packing an odd-dimensioned containeer that you cannot decant from?

It's OK to carry on about fuel efficiency, but there are other trade-offs. What the fuel is carried in counts as much as anything else.

This is a nebulous statement. Just what does "well within what I would expect for comparison to hydrocarbon fuels"?

You likely would have discovered this information if you had researched sufficiently.

Say wha...?

You can't burn a lower heat content fuel at twice the rate and transfer heat faster by just making the pool of fuel larger. First, the fuel has a specific amount of heat per mass. If it has less heat per mass, you have to burn more of it to transfer that heat. If you make a large pool of it, you just lose more of the heat to the surroundings. You also have mass transport problems with larger pools of fuel. The yellow flame of your picture and the sooted bottom of the pot indicate that you aren't burning the fuel efficiently because the fuel isn't getting enough oxygen.

There are natural laws that you simply can't violate which dictate how much heat a substance has and how fast that heat can be delivered. You can't break them or even bend them. You may think you have bent them but you really haven't. You are likely comparing caulk to cheese by doing a poorly controlled experiment. You can compare the fuels and the heating rates but you need to use equipment that is the same or at least similar enough to give you a meaningful comparison.

Let's not wander off into silly territory. Sticking to the point of liquid fuels used for camp stoves, there is definitely a difference in the energy transfer between ethanol and kerosene and the equipment used to burn the fuel. For example, kerosene used in a Trangia would provide more heat than ethanol because it has a higher amount of energy to give up. In an open burn situation, however, the amount of oxygen getting to the fuel would be limited and it would burn cool. It would produce lots of unburned carbon which is an indication energy loss. Pressurize it, atomize the fuel and efficiently mix it with oxygen and you can capture nearly all of the energy the fuel has to offer.

On the other hand, if you were to do the same with ethanol, i.e. pressurize it, atomize it and efficiently mix it with oxygen, you would see a gain in capturing energy but there isn't as much to gain as hydrocarbon fuels. Your fuel is partially oxidized and therefore doesn't has as much energy to give up.

I hate to break this to you, but most of the alcohol fuels you are likely to use, outside of something like Everclear, are produced from petroleum. Drinking ethanol is made by biological processes and has been for millennia. But commercially produced ethanol that is use in denatured ethanol is made through refining and cracking and treating oil.

Yes the -OH is on the middle carbon atom, my high school chemistry is a bit rusty, the way I learned it was to put the number of the carbon atom next to the functional group hence propan-2-ol and propan-1-ol

When I got away from alcohol stoves, it felt good to be no longer so cramped and limited by their incapabilities. Glad I'm out.

To convey something of what it felt like making the transition, this comes to mind as a reasonably good approximation: