Gattonero wrote:pjclinch wrote:Gattonero wrote:Not a big fan of them: you cannot see how much fuel you have left, you get an annoying empty container to discard pretty soon, you may have a defective valve that makes the gas burner unusable, and the list goes on... a meths/spirit burner can only go wrong if you overfill it, there's no parts that can fail or broke unless you literally walk over the burner
Or if you're melting snow, you die of old age...
Gas is cleaner, easier and more controllable, and if you need power it has more than a spirit burner, and is safer and less of a faff to refuel.
Used a Trangia with a spirit burner for well over a decade, bought a gas burner more as a curiosity than anything else, have hardly ever used the spirit burner since. The phrase "now we're cooking with gas" isn't "now we're cooking with spirit" for a reason. Or more likely, several reasons...
The phrase "now we're cooking with gas" is not a universal law
It's an English-language idiom meaning "now things are going very well"
Gattonero wrote:we all have different needs and go in different ways.
Gas being a good way to cook is a typical case, not a universal one. If I felt it was universal I wouldn't also have a reflector oven, a spirit burner, a multi-fuel pressure stove and a Kelly kettle.
Gattonero wrote:I can't see clearly (unless I use a digital scale) how much fuel I have left.
I can't tell
exactly how much, but there again I can tell if I've got
enough by shaking the can.
Gattonero wrote:And especially, if everything fails with a spirit burner (really, what can go wrong in something that has no valves/moving parts??) the same stove support/windshield can use Esbit or wood fuel. Something you cannot do with the typical windshield for a gas stove!
The windshield for a Trangia with a gas converter is exactly the same windshield as a Trangia without a gas converter...
As with liquid fuels for pressure stoves, a lot of the choice driver will be fuel availability: I used spirit for years because I was skint but had free access to supplies of old-style duplicator fluid, which is basically alcohol, and subsequently lab alcohol (pure ethanol). But if you've got the fuel, when it comes to clean, controlled cooking gas really takes a lot of beating
Pete.
Often seen riding a bike around Dundee...