Survey Of Stove Types By Fuel
The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. — John Ruskin
Most of us aren’t interested in chemical formulas. When we think of stoves by type of fuel, we think in terms that our minds can accept. These are solid, liquid and gas, so let us join hands and be simple-minded together. It’s lots easier, and if one of us begins to weaken from the sheer exhaustion then the rest can keep us from keeling over and hurting ourselves when we hit the ground.
Solid Fuel
Now that we have our feet on the ground (some of us may even be sitting at this point — I don’t know about you, but it’s easier on MY head), let’s go ahead and start with the solid stuff.
Solid fuels are going to be mostly familiar things, like dung, though maybe you don’t burn it that often, outside of that special office Christmas party that no one wants to admit really happened. You can readily identify dung because it’s brown and sounds like a bell. (Credit: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.) If dried well. Not so much otherwise, but you can normally recognize the wet stuff too. Isn’t it odd how we keep coming back to dung? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, bung to dung. Oh, my.
You’ll be more familiar with our dear old friend wood, one substance that does grow on trees, luck be with us. And on furniture, pencils and window frames, but they tend to be scarce on the average hiking trail.
If you do happen on a bus load of hiking writers all scrunched down in a bunch and scribbling, feel free to steal some of their pencils and make a cooking fire. They may not catch on for a while. And if they do, you can just push one of them down and make him cry. Pick the weakest-looking one (this may be the hard part). The rest will mill around in confusion and might just write bad things about you later, after they send home for more pencils, but if they do get more pencils you will just have more fuel to burn. So there.
During the summer season you might try burning charcoal briquettes and see how that suits you. Charcoal burns hot and clean, but it’s messy, and slow to get lit. You can make your own charcoal by heating sticks in a tightly-sealed steel can (with a hole in the lid for the smoke to come out). Or you can try crushing briquettes and reshaping them into a more usable form. But you’d need some binder to hold the stuff together. Either option would be a tedious mess.
If you’re adventurous and have a bent toward scientific investigation or are just plain bent you may have set fire to lumps of paraffin, twists of paper, or grass or straw, or dead bugs, dried boogers or wads of cash (if you had extra), just to see how they burned.
Some companies even make solid chemical concoctions known as hexamine and trioxane, produced in factories and industriously stamped into tablets by huge impersonal machines that you and I will never get to know, love or operate with even a clumsy imprecision. Some hikers swear by these tablets, some swear at them, and many other people just swear for the sheer joy of it.
Solid fuels are nice because they’re solid. This has turned out to be one of life’s great coincidences. You can break solids into smaller solid pieces and carry them all in a bag, burning some now and saving the rest for later. And they don’t explode. Mostly. (Note to self: Remember bad, bad experiment with black powder. Bad, bad day.)
Liquid Fuels
Liquid fuels are trickier. We’re getting into areas that most of our brains aren’t adapted to deal with. We come from people who generally started off by tearing huge chunks of raw beast right off the bone with wide and sturdy teeth. After millions of years some of them grudgingly adopted fire on a trial basis, but only because they liked the feel of warm fat running down and dripping off their slick chins. All those ancient fires were burning wood (or, well, yes, maybe a little dung, too, for flavor).
Liquid fuels ARE trickier. They involve esoteric and arcane areas of study. Areas like chemistry. Chemistry that can catch on fire and run right between your fingers if you let it, and then run flaming down your arm to the elbow and so on. Liquid fuels are harder by at least an order of magnitude. And they puddle too. How uncommonly rude of these substances. To puddle like that.
For example, take the word “big”. That makes sense. Everyone has seen something “big”. No one needs an explanation. At one time we were all “small”, so we can relate to “big” without being specific. This is pretty good for a word with one syllable and three letters.
Now take the phrase “harder by at least an order of magnitude”. If it helps, use the phrase “bigger by at least an order of magnitude”. Compare “big” to “bigger by at least an order of magnitude” and that shows you right there what kind of leap we have to make. Suddenly things have gotten so hard, so very hard.
An order of magnitude is the class of scale or magnitude of any amount, where each class contains values of a fixed ratio to the class preceding it. The ratio most commonly used is 10. Colloquially, the phrase “orders of magnitude” is usually used to describe a value that is many times larger than the value to which it is being compared. For example: The planet Jupiter has a surface area many orders of magnitude larger than that of the Moon.*
Damn, I’m snoring again. And now I have a grumpy headache too. That’s how big a leap we had to go through to get from burning piles of animal crap just to crummy old white gas.
With liquid fuels we’re dealing with stuff produced either by petroleum refining or by more natural processes. The petroleum fuels have a lot of fussy subcategories but they’re basically oily, smelly substances like diesel fuel, kerosene and lamp oil, or thin, runny, explosive substances like white gas. All of them are fairly nasty but they don’t smell good enough to eat, and they won’t rot.
The other liquid fuels come from what we can think of as natural sources. These are fuels like the alcohols and various vegetable oils. Even though your stove alcohol might come from a factory of some kind, you could really make it yourself, if you wanted to, so let’s consider it “natural”.
Forget about natural oils. Experiment if you like, but we’ve got some limits here, and olive oil in a backpacking stove is way over on the other side of the fence. Let’s not even consider rendering the neighbor’s cat or skimming the pot while making chicken soup. Go somewhere else, whyncha? Please, for once.
The alcohols are pretty good, though methanol (wood alcohol) is something to be slightly more careful with, and is one ingredient of denatured alcohol. Methanol is definitely toxic, and can be absorbed through the skin. If you drink it, it will hurt you, real bad. It will make you go blind, and then it will make you die, even if you don’t want to. And if it doesn’t kill you outright, you may wish that it had.
Denatured alcohol is made from ethanol (“drinking alcohol” or grain alcohol, sometimes called “party fluid”) plus methanol. This makes it “denatured”, meaning that it’s no good for human consumption. As if there was something natural about drinking things that make you stupid. “Denatured” means that it will hurt you if you drink it, and not in a good way at all, not hurt as in waking up tomorrow with a headache and a case of the pukes. Hurt as in really hurt, so you don’t even think about drinking it again. Please refer to the paragraph about methanol if you need more info.
As chemical substances go, though, ethanol is pretty safe unless you set it on fire, which is kind of the point here, unfortunately.
If you’re skittish about burning a mixture that contains methanol, you can always turn to Everclear, a drinkable 95% (190 proof) blend of ethanol and water, though it’s expensive, and at 190 proof, the drinkability rating is debatable. This stuff is strong enough to kill. As in kill you before you can set the glass down. No slow and unfortunate death following a permanent episode of blindness, no. Just a loud bang inside your head and then a loud thump as you hit the far shore.
If you like your thrills from a glass, maybe you should just stick to single malt scotch and forget about the backpacking. Even if Everclear doesn’t kill you it might just remove the hide from your gizzard on the way down, which is not a pleasant experience at all, not even once.
Incidentally, the idea of “proof” is rumored to have come from throwing a sample of whiskey onto a pile of gunpowder, followed shortly by a lit match. If the mixture burned then that was proof that the whiskey was strong enough. Otherwise there was too much water in it. You can tell here, can’t you, that we’re getting up closer to the edge. You don’t have to do this sort of thing with a pile of sticks that you intend to roast a rat over. With liquid fuels we’re right on the edge of death — either by poisoning or by explosion, like so much of modern life. Liquid fuels really ARE different.
If you decide to burn Everclear you’re either dumb or rich. (These two qualities have been known to simultaneously occur in the same person. After all, if you’re rich you can hire someone else to think for you and continue doing irresponsible and fun, dumb things.) If you decide to use Everclear as stove fuel and then change your mind you can make drinks with it, such as:
Purple Whodunit:
Ingredients:
- 1 part ginger ale
- 1 part grape juice
- 1 part Everclear
Directions:
- Combine ingredients.
- Drink.
Disclaimer and warning stuff and all that: Must be of legal drinking age in your part of the universe. Drinking, let alone to excess, may make you clumsier and even less interesting than nature intended. Do not spill on clothes and then set yourself on fire. And so on.
Do not drink and drive. Do not drink and backpack. Do not drink and go exploring around the top of that really cool waterfall you saw this afternoon. Do not drink and do anything else but keep very still until it wears off, preferably under close supervision.
Limit: one per customer, if that. When in tough situations like this, stop and try to remember what your mother said. I wish I had listened to mine, but I have no idea what she said because I wasn’t listening. Don’t be like me. (Or Arthur Dent, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who was the first to say this.)
On to duller subjects.
Rubbing alcohol is also known as isopropanol. With a higher molecular weight than the other two alcohols, it contains more energy per unit volume, but it’s not a good choice for stove fuel because it burns with a whole lot of soot (because it has a higher molecular weight, duh). Can’t win. Dang. Avoid it. Not good for cooking, or they would have called it cooking alcohol.
Gaseous Fuels
For most people the most convenient stoves are those that burn compressed gas. This gas will be butane or isobutane, maybe with a little propane thrown in to confuse things. Just buy a stove, buy a canister, ram the two together and cook. These stoves are clean and tidy. Nothing to gather from under bushes or to pour through funnels or wipe up afterwards. No soot to speak of.
But on the expensive end, they are. And like stoves that burn liquid petroleum fuels these stoves are relatively complicated. If one springs a leak, you can’t just wedge it upright in one corner of your pack to keep it from spilling on your spare underwear. And if your canister is seven eighths empty, you probably aren’t going to take it on your next week-long trip. You’ll buy another canister, and eventually you’ll have a closet full of these mostly-empty canisters. Empty canisters are a little bit like hand grenades: pretty safe when handled with care, but they can bite if treated poorly.
Oddball Fuels
Way out in the lunatic fringe there are some other options. You can try a solar cooker if you have lots of time and a hot, nearby star putting out just the right wavelengths.
Some versions of the U.S. military “meal, ready to eat” (MRE) and some expensive, specialized backpacking foods come with chemical heaters. In the future maybe you can look for some backpacking-specific developments in this area, as well as in portable chemical refrigerants. This will no doubt call for another order-of-magnitude leap in evolution.
How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious starry firmament for a roof! In such places standing alone on the mountain-top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make - leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone - we all dwell in a house of one room - the world with the firmament for its roof - and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track. — John Muir (From his poem “Things to remember when your pants are on fire.”)
* From Wikipedia, a notoriously erratic source of facts, which makes it ideally suited as a source of information for this book.
Exercises
- Think about burning something. About how the flame, once created, leaps up to greet you, its master, with hot joy. Relish the power, the glory inherent in this process. Recall that you are one of the masters of creation. Perhaps THE master of creation. That, as such, you can do no wrong. You do, after all, make the rules, no? Hmmm.
- Go to the nearest fast food restaurant and place an order of magnitude. Be prepared to defend your position with subtle arguments and hand gestures.
- Find out where you can buy an MRE, then do it. Make sure that it’s within the expiration date. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. By the edibility and the number of calories. Make a note about this experience in your diary. If you’re a good writer, you can just read up on MREs and pretend you ate one. Your diary won’t know you’re lying when you write about the experience.
- Research John Muir, and see if he really did write a poem titled “Things to remember when your pants are on fire.”