Thread: Lightweight cooking system

Hi superdiver

My 2c

* It's the whole system weight that counts - stove, fuel, pan and windshield
* MSR Windburner - yup, plus I got the frying pan for it
* Alcohol stoves are super light, but fiddly. Compared with gas/white spirit, alcohol is slow and heavy for the same heat output. You'll most likely spill it and or burn yourself.
* Titanium is super light and super expensive. I have Evernew 0.9/1.3L pans which are quite thin and dent fairly easily which pisses me off having paid heaps.
* Ti is good for boiling water but very easy to burn when cooking e.g. porridge will catch with an instant's inattention as the heat concentrates in one spot without spreading
* Stainless steel is tough, heavy, and is easier to cook on as hot spots are less intense
* On balance, for my purposes, adonised aluminium is a good mix of light weight, low price, durable and OK to cook if you want more than boiling water.
* Other than the Windburner, the MSR Whisperlite Universal allows both gas and kero/spirit and is within cooey of the Windburner system weight by the time you add a pot and windshield
* Of the non-MSR cookers I think the Kovea Spider is the pick of the bunch - off canister, wide legs and pot supports, pre-heat tube so the canister can be inverted in cold weather, slightly heavier at 170g but highly versatile
* T7 have some cheapish aluminium pots but for some dumb-arse reason they didn't size them to stack inside each other? Macpac also.

System weights
MSR Windburner Personal 0.8L 825g (complete stove unit, 230g canister)
Windburner Duo 1.0L 855g (as above)
MSR Whisperlite Universal 975g (stove, 230g canister, 1.0L alu pot, windshield)
with kero and 325ml bottle 980g
MSR Pocket Rocket 2 775g (as for Whisperlite system bits, 200g lighter and much less stable)
Kovea Spider 875g (as above)

So weight isn't really the deciding factor to my mind once you take the whole system into account

I couldn't care less about boil times as they're all very similar, except for alcohol which is twice as slow. The Windburner/Jetboils are a lot better in a breeze and somewhat more efficient but I tend to seek out sheltered spots anyway. The litres boiled per 230g canister are 14-18 litres across the models above with the Windburners at the upper end of that. Using a lid on a pan/pot reduces gas used by 20-25%. I've tested this with the stove sitting on kitchen scales while boiling pots of water. Pathetic I know.