horizon wrote:Tangled Metal wrote:BTW if you think the meths burner is fast then you'll love the gas burner for Trangia. No contest in the speed stakes.
I always had a little Camping Gaz Bluet stove so knew that gas was quick. But I thought that meths would be very slow, you know, go off for a walk and come back half an hour later sort of thing. But it isn't. When gas is slow though is when the cyclinder is running out - with meths you don't have that problem.
While people do go on a bit about meths being slow I've only been at the yawning stage using it for snow melting where it really is very much not the best. On the other hand, not a common issue for most campers.
While a Trangia is relatively slow compared to gas stoves you can get around a lot of that with the stove's ability to be left entirely to its own devices while you get on with something else. Set it going first thing on arrival and it'll be boiling happily the second you finish pitching the tent.
With a remote-can setup with a fuel pre-heat loop like a Trangia Gas you can eke the end out of a cylinder far more effectively than a can-top one, with a bit of judicious shaking and inverting the can. The pre-heat loop ensures that the irregular fuel supply/state all comes out as gas rather than rather dangerous liquid. Can-top stoves are also harder to effectively shield from the wind.
Boiling times seem to be a common metric for comparing stoves, but it's used more because it's an easy number to work out rather than it relates to much about the actual usefulness of a stove. Fuel weight per boiled litre or the like would be a bit more useful, but in practice most people take a bit more fuel than they know they'll need and don't sweat the few extra grammes.
Pete.
