gabby
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Post by gabby on May 17, 2019 18:00:35 GMT -8
Okay, amigos: I bought a Sterno Inferno to get the pot. (I don't have enough pots, you see...) The plastic lid that comes with the Sterno kit is way too heavy, and - as someone said in a Youtube video - distorts with higher heat. So I threw that out. The good news for me is, the MBD (Tinny) 10cm pot lid (of which I must have a half dozen) fits perfectly. I'll try her out tomorrow morning. (I've used 4 stoves in the last 3 days!)
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gabby
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Post by gabby on May 18, 2019 6:59:38 GMT -8
Okay, as promised, shortly after rising to feed the ravenous local herd of cats (clowder is the term, I believe: there are 11, both inside and out, as well as here and in my neighbor's yard), I went out to test my newest pot and make hot water for coffee.
The pictures and videos haven't arrived on the iCloud yet, so about all I can report now, before setting out on my morning walk, is that I used a White Box stove (old model with the Frankenstein bolts) and got a totally unimpressive 7:35 to boil. Not nearly good enough to justify the extra ounce - ounce and a half weight of this pot, not to mention the extra inconvenience in actually attempting to cook something - because I strongly suspect that what you'd get would be scorched food. So, a little faster for 16 oz. of water, but disappointing.
On top of that, the bottom 1/4" of the plastic coating on the handles burned, even though the White Box's jets are well under the edge of the heat exchanger - I got flames shooting out the holes on the side of the pot sufficiently far that they reached the bottom of the handles. Mind, the handles weren't hot at all when I removed the pot from the stove - so the insulation works well enough - but the plastic material used is something less than fire retardant. No problem: the covering can be replaced with silicone aquarium tubing, and (FYI!) I wouldn't extend the covering further down than the lower bend in the handles.
Overall, not as exciting a result as I might have hoped. (So it goes...)
ETA: I neglected to mention yet another disturbing aspect of using the White Box with this pot: since the WB flame is largely confined to the area inside the fins and enclosure on the bottom of the pot (as usual with this style of alcohol stove, the pot rests directly on the top rim of the WB), I got a substantial toxic smell from the denatured alcohol I used in the stove, and this was even with a moderate wind blowing about and the MSR windscreen I put up fairly distant from the stove and pot (see photo below).
Inside of a reasonably vented windscreen, one that's not overly close to the pot (1/2" or more), I get little of this. I have had this happen in the past when I tried various "windscreen systems" that were very tight fits for the pot on top of an alcohol stove, reducing the amount of air mixing with the fumes.
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Post by bradmacmt on May 18, 2019 11:45:33 GMT -8
Gabby... can you give the dimensions and weight of the pot? Perhaps a photo of the bottom (business side) of the pot?
I think we share a similar fascination with stoves, pots and associated accutriment's!
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RumiDude
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Post by RumiDude on May 18, 2019 13:27:00 GMT -8
Here is a test from six years ago on the Olicamp XTS Pot.
Rumi
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gabby
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Post by gabby on May 18, 2019 13:36:10 GMT -8
Hope this is what you wanted: Component | grams | ounces | cup/pot only | 126 | 4.4 | original lid | 56 | 2.0 | MBD lid | 17 | 0.6 | cup & original lid | 182 | 6.4 | cup & MBD 10cm lid | 143 | 5.0 |
Just for good measure: Component | grams | ounces | red stove windscreen & pot support | 51 | 1.8 | expanding leg support | 57 | 2.0 | snuffer | 12 | 0.4 |
So, everything but the plastic pot lid & snuffer is 234g/8.3oz total height of the pot is 4 3/8" pot diameter is 4 1/16" pot depth is just under 3 3/8" height to 16oz line inside pot is 2.5" pot is 16oz (16oz line is 7/8" from top of pot) The parts noted above can, I suppose, be easily identified from pictures on the web. All the following pictures have been reduced in size by 2/3s, so if you right click and display them in a new tab, you'll get the original resolution. Bottom (business end) of the pot. Note the charred handle insulation.Bottom of the pot with WB stove inserted. Note that the jets on the WB are just inside the bottom limit of the heat exchanger enclosure. The fins on the heat exchanger are shorter than the enclosure, unlike those on the Primus Eta 1L pot I've used before, which uses a simple stabilizing ring on the bottom of the fins.The Inferno pot on top of the WB this morning. I put an MSR windscreen around the stove and pot because the storm coming from the West Coast was arriving, and the wind was up a bit, but not really all that bad.I did a few videos, but they aren't all that good and don't show much that you couldn't gather from my post above.
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gabby
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Post by gabby on May 19, 2019 7:26:29 GMT -8
This morning I decided to try an alcohol stove with a burn pattern more like a conventional center flame alcohol stove, so I pulled out my "MBD Prototype" stove with remote feed. I thought about using my homemade Pepsi can stove, but I figured I'd have to to fuss with the pot stand to get the right distance from the flame, given the extra space imposed by the heat exchanger assembly on the bottom of the pot. So I opted to use this stove because it has a built-in pot stand, which inclined me to simply place the pot on the stand, rather than play with some sort of "adjustment" to get the flame closer to the pot. Considering the extra fumes I got when the flame of the WB was "captured" inside the heat exchanger "cage", I figured it was worth a shot anyway to avoid that. BTW, I didn't get nearly as much "toxic fume" today. As you can see (I hope) from the following photo, the stove is quite a bit further from the bottom of the pot than was the WB. You'll notice that I trimmed the burned part of the handle insulation back to just before the bend in the bottom part of the handles. If you're reasonably careful, this isn't really a problem. The handles are, at least in this setup, outside of the heated area inside the windscreen, so there wouldn't have been a problem anyway, I suspect. I got some of the strangest sounds I've ever heard in my experience with alcohol stoves from this setup. Around 170° - 180°, I consistently get a low, barely audible groaning sound from the pot. This morning, just as bubbles were forming on the bottom of the pot, the Inferno pot emitted a louder, but still just audible sound in a higher register, much like you'd expect to hear when metal was being twisted or bent. I'm suspicious that this is differential heating of the fins and bottom of the pot, and maybe even the enclosing "heat exchanger cage". I suspect that repeated use might result in the welds on the fins coming loose, but aluminum is fairly soft, so maybe not. Time will tell - assuming I start using this pot more. I believe the usual time to a boil with this stove is around 8 - 9 minutes, so this is a bit better. (Assuming you care about that.) Still not enough change to perhaps justify the extra ounce or so in pot weight, but this is an experiment for the sake of stimulating discussion (maybe) and for me to think about what adjustments might improve the setup. The ambient temperature was 77°, somewhat warmer than yesterday's 67°. There was virtually no wind, and it was quite humid (75%). Note: Photos were resized before posting - I fear I'm using up too much space using "full size" images. However, I've reduced the size shown here by 2/3s, so performing the "right click and open in new tab" operation will show the actual size of these, though they're not nearly the resolution of the previous photos.
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BigLoad
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Post by BigLoad on May 19, 2019 8:55:33 GMT -8
I'm suspicious that this is differential heating of the fins and bottom of the pot, and maybe even the enclosing "heat exchanger cage". I suspect that repeated use might result in the welds on the fins coming loose, but aluminum is fairly soft, so maybe not. Time will tell - assuming I start using this pot more. Yeah, it's probably doomed. The weld design would be based on thermal modeling that assumes a particular magnitude and location of heat sources. I guess they didn't build in a lot of margin.
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Post by bradmacmt on May 19, 2019 10:45:16 GMT -8
Gabby, thanks for all the really great information. I may have to get one of these pots and retrofit a lighter lid. This might be the potentially lightest heat-exchange pot I've seen. I'd like to test it against a "normal" pot (one without the heat exchange fins) and compare boil times with my new MSR Pocket Rocket Deluxe.
I think truly empirical testing requires an indoor scenario (no wind and controlled temp). H2o volume and temps should be identical, and brand new (identical and full)) canisters should be used.
I often see online tests of one stove vs. another, and the results are doubtful because the controls are so sloppy, often done outdoors with variable winds, no water temp control, and differing fuel canisters.
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gabby
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Post by gabby on May 20, 2019 13:10:55 GMT -8
This morning around 9 AM or so, I tried yet another stove with the Inferno pot. You can see water on the patio here because I was in a rush to finish and did stupid stuff like deciding to photograph the bottom of the pot with the windscreen after I'd filled it with water. Oops! My old penny alcohol stove (over)fueled, weighed ~67g. I made this stove about 15 or 16 years ago. Still going good. Standard cola can stove in the "penny stove" style, though I use a quarter over the 7/16" filler hole, not an actual penny. Two bottoms from Coke cans cut about 3/4" up from the bottom of the can. I marked them by holding a Sharpie tip inserted through a punch hole in an old credit card and turning the can. Then I cut to the line with scissors by punching through higher up on the can and cutting down to the line. Crimp one of the two pieces - the one that will go inside the other - at regular intervals inward with your thumb. (But not too much - just enough to make the circumference slightly smaller than the other piece.) You can also lubricate with something (vaseline? graphite?) and slide it over the end of a full soda can to stretch it. Hint: I use the "crimp method", then put a sparing coat of red RTV (room temperature vulcanizing) gasket cement around the outside of the inner part to both lubricate before pressing the two halves of the stove together, and also to keep the stove from coming apart or spewing burning alcohol if the halves aren't put together well enough. Fill the inner/lower can bottom with insulation material to wick the fuel, cut a small round piece of aluminum screening to put under the filler hole (on top of the insulation), and slide the two halves together carefully. (The foil-thick aluminum has been known to split during this process.) Punch jet holes with a pushpin, or drill them with a small drillbit. Place them inside the can bottom ridge for narrow pots, and outside the can bottom ridge for wide pots. Wire pot stand inserted into the HX cage. Most of the wire pot stands I have were made by Tinny @mbd (MiniBullDesigns), so they're welded into a cylindrical shape. I made this one, so the "welds" didn't hold all that well. That made it easy to put in the cage on this pot because it wasn't one piece. There is a downside to this arrangement, however. When I went to take the pot off the pot stand, it came away (of course) with the windscreen and the stove. I didn't expect that, but how could I have missed the possibility of that happening? Windscreen in place and burn started. I placed the windscreen just a bit tighter around the pot than I did with the WB stove in my previous "test", primarily because the WB is a side jet stove, and flames were coming out of the openings around the HX fins. I've burned holes in windscreens before. Pot @ ~3:30 mins. Pot @ ~5:00 mins. Pot @ ~6:00 mins. Pot @ ~7:45 mins. I got a boil in ~7:53. The stove weighed 58g after I removed the pot, pot stand and stove (yikes!) and blew out the flames. That means it used 9g of fuel for the burn. Now I'm wishing I'd measured the fuel on the previous runs. So far, we have: Stove | Boil Time | White Box | 7:35 | MBD "Proto" | 6:13 | Homemade Cola Can | 7:53 |
I may do one more run with this pot to compare the same stove on both a non-HX and HX pot at the same time under the same conditions. I'm thinking I'll use the BRS 3000T (canister top, which I got for $8 apiece online from Hong Kong) since I have 4 of them.
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ErnieW
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Post by ErnieW on May 20, 2019 16:35:49 GMT -8
I got a substantial toxic smell from the denatured alcohol I used in the stove I would guess this means un-burnt fuel in the air. So besides modest boil times this set up may be using more fuel to boil than needed.
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gabby
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Post by gabby on May 22, 2019 11:59:40 GMT -8
So, campers, I went out this morning and tried a "dry run" on the BRS 3000 with the Inferno heat transfer pot. I started with a 110g Snowpeak canister, a fold out canister stand, a large BIC, and the BRS 3000 (in the green bag) inside the Inferno pot. Once again, note the "shaved" insulation on the lower part of the handles of the Inferno pot. Although my intention was to fill the pot to the 16 oz line, if you look closely you can see from the photo that the water in the pot is closer to the 300ml line. I guess I get a little sloshing when I'm pouring the water in, and I'm not being nearly as careful as I should. The pictures from 2 days ago show the same thing. It's more obvious in the final photo in this group, but then some water boiled away by the time of the last photo - or boiled over. This is the pot @ ~30 seconds. The pot at ~1 minute. The pot @ ~1:40. This happened kinda fast, so I think the pot was boiling around ~1:50 - 1:55, but the "official time" I recorded was ~2:14. (Visually observing the water is a much larger "disturbance" of the process at these rates, so I should break out my old remote temperature probe and digital timer from my alcohol stove testing days for much more accurate measurements. I've gotten sloppy in the last 10 years or so.) Check the lower righthand corner of this photo - by the time I lifted the lid to check the water and take this picture at ~2:10, the water was boiling so violently that I caught a blob of water shooting over the side. ( I had no idea the iPhone lens was that fast. :^D) Below: after the "dry run" "test". You can't see it in this photo, but the area under the canister is wet from all the water that boiled over. The pot is at almost exactly 300ml. I had to carefully place the Inferno pot on the BRS 3000 stove legs before lighting the stove. I tested the stove's legs for fit before starting and found that the legs easily fit inside the ring on the bottom of the pot, but the legs stand wide enough that I had to place the legs so that each was positioned, somewhat precariously, on a heat exchanger fin. Because of the "non-radial" orientation of the BRS 3000's legs, it was impossible to get all 3 of them positioned between the fins. This means that the pot could have tipped when boiling occurred, since boiling usually causes even a flat-bottomed pot to wiggle considerably. When I went to turn the stove off, a blob of hot water flew out and struck my thumb - I had inadvertently positioned the stove's valve away from me! Ooops!
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gabby
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Post by gabby on May 23, 2019 13:08:49 GMT -8
I know I've beat this to death already, but I went out and boiled water 3 times this morning with the BRS 3000, once with the Imusa 10cm aluminum pot shown here in the setup I used, and twice with the Sterno Inferno, of which you've already - I'm sure - seen quite enough. The wind was blowing gently now and again, and may have affected the results a bit. When the temperature reached ~207° or 208°, both pots were boiling. The Inferno pot was boiling so furiously that, as I predicted yesterday, the pot boiled over and was shaken off the stove's legs in both runs, each leg of the stove being precariously perched on a heat exchanger fin under the pot as I described yesterday. This resulted in a moderate-sized spill both times and the end of the test. On the second test, the spilled water put out the flame on the stove. I was not, however, burned. The temperature probe was set at 210.0° in order to give me a beep before the boiling point. As I should have recalled from all those alcohol stove tests some time ago, the temperature of boiling where I live is actually closer to 210°, since Austin is "officially" at 489' elevation, and we Northwest Austinites are closer to 1100'. Enough already. :^D
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RumiDude
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Post by RumiDude on May 24, 2019 6:46:41 GMT -8
So gabby, the results indicate that with a canister stove the heat exchanger pot does make a significant difference in boil times. One can assume that gas usage is similarly affected and this improved efficiency. That would be similar to the results of the video I posted earlier in the thread. Rumi
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gabby
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Post by gabby on May 24, 2019 10:06:52 GMT -8
One can assume that gas usage is similarly affected and this improved efficiency. That would be similar to the results of the video I posted earlier in the thread. This is an issue I have meant to address in all the tests I've done here, since it's probably of more interest to most than "boil time". A regrettable oversight on my part due mostly to the casual way in which I've been doing these tests. In future, I'll weigh fuel, as I almost casually did in the test with my old "Pepsi stove" some days ago. I suspect that it was, in fact, the homemade stove itself that prompted me to do that in that one instance, since "weighing for fuel use" was one of the things I consistently logged in all of my alcohol stove tests long ago. As a "test product", speed is not nearly as consequential as fuel consumption - if fuel consumption had been the benchmark in formula 1, NASCAR, drag races and tractor pulls, what would our vehicles look like now? the results indicate that with a canister stove the heat exchanger pot does make a significant difference in boil times. The difference might be seen as similarly substantial for alcohol stoves, but I didn't make that sort of test. From memory, my alcohol boil times were more in the range of 10 to 11 minutes, as cp. to the less than 8 minute time I got with, for instance, my old "Pepsi can" stove. I would dig (an archaeological term I've lately become familiar with - thanks, driftwoody) for those figures, but I'm 3 or 4 computers down the road from those tests now, and God only knows on which of the 70+ internal and external drives in this house they were left. Remember when Mom and Dad had all their Kodak Brownie B&W photos in a few shoeboxes in the bedroom closet? The photos may have had a tendency to fade a bit, but we knew where they were. Thanks for having the patience to do these tests and sharing the results with us. I do get some small reward from the boiled water I produce.
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Post by bradmacmt on May 25, 2019 5:17:23 GMT -8
If I'm seeing correctly, in the pot I see the water at the 300ml mark, but OVER the 12oz mark. 300ml = 10.14 US fluid ounces, or 10.55 UK ounces, which would mean something is wrong with the pots measurement marks.
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