Sunday, December 8, 2013

Below freezing temperatures and alcohol stoves


Yes, alcohol stoves do work in below freezing temperatures.   Here is a video to demonstrate.  The stove in the video was made out of one pop can.  It is called a YACC stove.  YACC stands for Yet Another Coke Cane stove.

The temperature outside was -7C or 19F, that is well below freezing.  There was no wind so I was able to leave the windscreen open for this video.

In general alcohol stoves are not the best if you need to melt snow, it takes too long to melt snow with an alcohol stove.  If you just want to boil water and alcohol stove works just fine.  In the video it took 4.5 minutes to bring one cup of water to a boil and in continued to boil for 2 more minutes. 

The boil was a good strong boil, but not as strong of a boil as I have seen this stove get in warm weather.  Only about two tablespoons of alcohol were used.

By all means take your ultralight alcohol stove with you on cold weather camping trips as long as you know you won't have to melt snow to get water.





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