White gas stoves could be better

White gas stoves aren't markedly different than they were 20 years ago.  I learned to use MSR stoves in the late 90s and early 00s in the Boy Scouts, and those stoves are practically the same as what MSR sells today. In the meantime the whole JetBoil/Reactor cartridge stove thing has really won over a lot of users.

Why isn't there a high-efficiency, integral pot-stove setup that uses white gas?  Basically a liquid fueled Reactor?  Bonus if they could sell it a pressure cooker pot.  Is there some technical limitation I'm not thinking of, or it just too niche? The target market would include pretty deep-pocketed types (google "White Desert Antarctic Summit guided" if you want to know who I'm talking about ;) )  The first person to bring one of these to market would probably sell 2 to every Denali team. 

Also, if you take my ten billion dollar idea, you can have it as long as you send me a stove.

All those wind screen style integrated pots exist to solve a problem that the white gas stoves solved 30 years ago with a sheet of aluminum: blocking the wind.

You can’t put a windscreen around a canister stove without risking a BOOM. (Unless the canister is separate and outside the wind screen.) So it has to be built into the pot system.

If it is not already on your radar, you may get a kick out of the Svea 123 from the 50's.

It seems to have evolved into the Optimus Svea over the years.

The Optimus almost has that integrated mug you are looking for.

Jake907 wrote:

The first person to bring one of these to market would probably sell 2 to every Denali team. 

i'm willing to bet canister stoves are going to completely phase out white gas stoves on denali in the next 5-10 years (climbing season, winter summits are the exception). these days, there are plenty of teams summitting the butt with just canister stoves.

curt86iroc wrote:

i'm willing to bet canister stoves are going to completely phase out white gas stoves on denali in the next 5-10 years (climbing season, winter summits are the exception). these days, there are plenty of teams summitting the butt with just canister stoves.

I’ll take this bet.  $250 at 5 years?

I have a cabinet full of every kind of stove, experimented with all.

I use Jet Boil because I'm too busy to cook and I just pound a 2-person serving of Mountain House.  In below freezing high humidity situations I hold it in my lap and warm the canister with my hands to keep it from freezing.

If you want to actually get into cooking food you need a Whisperlight with white gas.  I've got 4 of them I don't ever use.  I've no time for that shit.

White gas isn't nearly as widely available in the US as it was 20 or 30 years ago, and it never was easy to find outside the US. It's also gone up in prce a lot more than gas cartridges. Auto fuel never was all that good for a liquid fuel stove, and gas stations are increasingly reluctant to let you pump gas into anything but your gas tank or something that they recognize as a fuel container. Meanwhile  gas cartridges have gotten better (20% propane/80% isobutane instead of n,-butane) and more widely available in standardized form. Even if you could design a liquid fuel stove with an integrated pot, heat exchanger and windscreen, the pump would add bulk, weight, cost and reliability issues, so what would you gain? 

The JetBoil/Reactor/Windburner thing has won over a lot of users because it really works well a lot of the time, and the rest of the time an inverted canister stove is easier to use than any liquid fuel stove I've used.

If it makes you feel any better I have my dads original whisperlite from 1984 and it still makes pizzas like a champ

I feel like the best solution is just propane. Here in the northeast if I’m doing a mini expedition where it can get seriously cold, I bring 1 of the green Coleman propane canisters and the large/wide screw on burner that can hold a pretty large pot or pan. Bury the canister in a bit of snow for stability or set it on a flat surface. Never an issue with pressure giving out or flame sputtering. Marginally heavier than a white gas set up. No mess. No maintenance. No flare up. No wind screen. It’s just incredibly simple. And propane is good down to what, like -45 ambient air temps. You aren’t going to hit that cold very often, and if you do just bury it in snow which keeps it close to 32F.

The problem with this solution for denali (I actually asked this specific question in Steve house’s Covid zoom presentation about how to climb denali) is that Denali’s current infrastructure doesn’t support this. They fly in white gas for you to purchase/pickup on the glacier. And you can’t fly in with your own pressurized propane tanks. 

The green Coleman propane canisters are significantly heavier than the 1 lb isobutane canisters. A 1 lb MSR isobutane/propane canister weighs 23 oz., while a 1 lb green Coleman canister weighs 2 lbs. Multiply that weight difference by the fuel required for a team doing Denali and you've got a significant amount of extra weight to be hauled from where you get off the plane to 14,000 or 17,000 feet, depending on where you make your summit bid from. Multiply that weight difference by the amount that would get brought onto Denali for a climbing season and those airplanes are going to be working awfully hard just to haul a lot of scrap steel on and off the mountain. The 80% isobutane/20% propane mix in most fuel canisters (MSR, JetBoil, etc.) vaporizes at -10F at sea level, and -30F at 14,000 ft above sea level. A team doing Denali with two stoves could use a Reactor for snow melting and an inverted canister stove for "real" cooking or for if/when it got too cold for the Reactor to work. 

Kyle Tarry wrote:

I’ll take this bet.  $250 at 5 years?

ok, i can see larger guided parties that are actually cooking real food keeping white gas around. for private groups, i'm still willing to bet most transition to iso butane... the benefits are just too good (faster boiling, easier start up, less maintenance, safer etc.).

Funny to run across this thread: I just fired up my MSR XGK for the first time in a decade. I thought we might need it to melt snow on Shasta, but didn’t take it, (though had we spent another night or had another person in our party, it would’ve been nice.) I’ve been using a Jetboil for backpacking and a classic Coleman stove for car camping, so haven’t had a need for white gas. My question is, are the new Reactors and such as  capable at melting snow as old school XGKs and Whisperlights in an expedition setting? I haven’t been on Denali since 2012, so I’m kind of out of the loop. 

The best stove solution that I have found is an isobutane canister stove where the canister is connected with a hose. This allows a proper wind screen to be used and the canister can be inverted so it doesn't need to be kept warm. You can actually burn the canister all the way to empty every time.

I second Mat who promotes the Svea 123 above. I bought mine in 1972 and it works just fine and has never failed me. Imagine a white gas stove that doesn't need to be pumped! The big downside is dealing with white gas without setting yourself on fire or contaminating your gear with spill.

Get a cheap canister stove with a hose and try it: Cheap stove

Bale wrote:

My question is, are the new Reactors and such as  capable at melting snow as old school XGKs and Whisperlights in an expedition setting?

Not only are they just as capable, they're actually much faster. I did a test on the Ruth Glacier a few years ago. We compared (a) an XGK with windshield and MSR heat exchanger, and (b) a Reactor with an isobutane/propane canister. Pot sizes were identical (2.5 liters). The Reactor was literally twice as fast in getting from snow to boiling water. I repeated the test on my deck when I got back home, starting with ice-cold water. Same result. And that doesn't count the time spent getting the XGK connected and primed.

The Reactor setup was also much lighter. And the Reactor is so much more fuel-efficient that the fuel weight was lighter too, even taking the empty canister weight into account.

Since then I've used the Reactor on several trips to the St Elias range. It's worked like a charm. When it's very cold I stand the canister in shallow bowl of lukewarm water. I think this is a better solution than a remote inverted canister, because the Reactor's integrated windshield and heat exchanger are so effective. If you use a remote inverted canister system like the MSR WindPro then you have to set up your own windshield, which isn't nearly as effective.

Martin le Roux wrote:

Not only are they just as capable, they're actually much faster. 

Wow, back in my Rainier/ Denali days, it was pretty much a given that you took a white gas stove. Thanks for the info! 

Bale wrote:

My question is, are the new Reactors and such as  capable at melting snow as old school XGKs and Whisperlights in an expedition setting? I haven’t been on Denali since 2012, so I’m kind of out of the loop. 

While I agree with Martin that the Reactor is faster at melting snow, you’re constrained by the size of the 2.5L maximum pot size. With an XGK on an expedition you can throw a 10L pot full of snow on and let it melt while you do all the other expedition things like shoveling, food prep, more shoveling, reading, even more shoveling, and sport eating. 

Having both a Reactor and XGK is nice because they kinda fill different needs on a trip. While the Reactor is definitely great for fast hot water whether on route or at camp, the XGK (or Whisperlite) is nice for the slow base camp days where you have more time than you know what to do with and can just let the stove do it’s thing and make a giant pot of water for the whole day. 

Thread drift I know, but one more tip if using a Reactor. Spend $15 on a "Light My Fire" firesteel (ferrocerium rod), https://lightmyfire.com/us/swedish-firesteel-bio-scout-2in1. Works much better than a regular lighter, especially in cold and windy conditions. Also weighs next-to-nothing, and you can take it on a plane.

Thanks for the responses guys, and apologies to MSR for misspelling Whisperlite:) 

As an aside, since I didn’t use the XGK on Shasta, I had a liter of white gas just sitting around, so I asked my wife if she’d be willing to cook on it instead of the Coleman on our last car camp. It worked fine, but she wasn’t prepared for the roar of a jet engine;) 

My only question about canister stoves (I own and use one, will bring on Cassin Ridge) is how can you possible carry enough canisters for an expedition-style climb? For a group of 2-3 for 2-3 weeks we’re looking at a ridiculous amount of canisters since you can’t reup from base camp as mentioned above 

John Edwin wrote:

My only question about canister stoves (I own and use one, will bring on Cassin Ridge) is how can you possible carry enough canisters for an expedition-style climb? For a group of 2-3 for 2-3 weeks we’re looking at a ridiculous amount of canisters since you can’t reup from base camp as mentioned above 

Reactor stoves are very fuel-efficient. I've used them twice on trips to the St Elias range and we averaged about 3 oz of isobutane/propane fuel per person per day (less lower down, more higher up). So for a 20-day trip you would need four 16 oz canisters per person. I don't think that's "ridiculous".

By comparison, with a white gas stove you'd need about 4 oz of fuel per person per day (by weight) or 5 fl oz (by volume). (The energy content of white gas per unit of weight is very similar to isobutane/propane, but with white gas stoves you lose much more of that energy to the atmosphere). So for a 20 day-trip you'd need about 100 fl oz or three one-quart fuel bottles per person. That's slightly less bulky than four 16-oz gas canisters, but not by much. In terms of weight it's actually slightly heavier than four gas canisters, at least when you start out.