I usually use a gas canister stove but recently decided to see how alcohol faired having read so many positive things about it.
I've got a Lidls trangia copy burner and an Alpkit Mytimug so I rigged up a small stand and set about heating 500mls of water. It took over 20 minutes to come to a boil (ambient air temperature was 5 degrees with a slight breeze) which is really not practical for me. I tried again with 300ml as that's my standard cup size and by twenty minutes it hadn't even started to boil so I gave up. I had a small windshield and the fuel was producing what looked like nice, healthy blue jets of flame so I'm really not sure where I'm going wrong. I did wonder of titanium is maybe not the best of materials for this application due to it's rapid heat transfer and that might explain why the smaller volume of water appeared to take longer to heat.
I'm happy to try different burner/pot configurations if needs be but I'd really like to have a better understanding as to why my initial attempt was so poor. I've read some of the alcohol stove threads here and have browsed the Zen site but so far I'm not really any the wiser as to where I might have gone wrong.
I've got a Lidls trangia copy burner and an Alpkit Mytimug so I rigged up a small stand and set about heating 500mls of water. It took over 20 minutes to come to a boil (ambient air temperature was 5 degrees with a slight breeze) which is really not practical for me. I tried again with 300ml as that's my standard cup size and by twenty minutes it hadn't even started to boil so I gave up. I had a small windshield and the fuel was producing what looked like nice, healthy blue jets of flame so I'm really not sure where I'm going wrong. I did wonder of titanium is maybe not the best of materials for this application due to it's rapid heat transfer and that might explain why the smaller volume of water appeared to take longer to heat.
I'm happy to try different burner/pot configurations if needs be but I'd really like to have a better understanding as to why my initial attempt was so poor. I've read some of the alcohol stove threads here and have browsed the Zen site but so far I'm not really any the wiser as to where I might have gone wrong.