JETBOIL & MSR REACTOR | TESTING WITH LOW GAS & HIGH WIND | CAMPING STOVE EFFICIENCY SHOOT OUT

Hi folks, I'm Seamus from Outdoors Inspiration and this is Petra, my German Shepherd. Get off! So we went out to film yesterday and the rain was coming down like absolute stair rods. There were gusts of up to 70 miles an hour and it was quite good fun. However, because of the conditions I couldn't use my usual microphone so I went to the bear housing on the camera. And because the bear unit on the camera doesn't have any kind of wind noise suppression it means that the audio from those clips that I took yesterday is pretty unintelligible. So I'm going to do a little bit of an introduction to what we were up to yesterday from here today. So here's where my thought processes were going yesterday. I'm not a huge fan of comparing boil times of different stoves and that's because it's largely kind of theoretical really, isn't it? You take enough gas with you to see through the trip that you're doing. And let's face it, on a winter wild camp it's pretty dark after what five o'clock in the evening. What else are you going to do with your time? You might as well sit around a real flame while your water boils or your food cooks. But it struck me yesterday that due to the clinical nature of trying to measure an accurate boil time for different stoves they're done generally speaking with brand new gas canisters. And you could gauge the efficiency of the stove by looking at the end result through how much gas it used in weight and what seems to be the critical figure is how long it took to boil the water. And just for the record I'm not that fussed about how long water takes to boil or food will take to cook unless I want it in a hurry. And I'm not too fussed in the marginal differences of gas efficiencies of different burners. It bothers me not. But it was a Saturday afternoon pouring down with rain and gusting up to 70 miles an hour. So this seemed like a bit of fun for the afternoon. That's all. So the starting point was two well-used gas canisters. They're in a condition that I wouldn't normally take out on the hill. There's very little left in here. There's just a little bit of rattle left from the LPG inside there. So I stuck them both on the scales and they were within one gram of each other. And this to my mind is where stove efficiency is really going to count. Not testing a brand new gas cartridge in your kitchen or in a workshop or under clinical conditions. So we found ourselves some shelter in behind some rocks on a tour. The rain started to ease off. The wind didn't. But we were sheltered from the main blast of the wind but still had the buffeting about as sheltered as we could get in behind the rocks of this tour. And this was my objective. A hot chocolate. I was interested to see how this stove would behave. This is the MSR Reactor and it is kind of renowned to be a very fast boiling stove. It's an alpinist stove. It has one job in life and that is to melt snow very very quickly. And it's pretty unapologetic at that. That's what it does. It will boil water very very fast. But because the burner head has a gas regulator it means its consumption of gas is consistent from the start to the finish of a canister. The heat exchanger on the bottom of the pan works to improve the efficiency of the stove. But it doesn't just work on radiant heat. So the heat exchanger here, these fins, present a larger surface area for the base of the pot to heat up. That's the radiant heat working on that. But it works on convective heat as well by capturing the hot gases around the bottom of the pot. And those hot gases envelop the inside of the base of the pot as well. But MSR aren't the only people to put heat exchangers on the bottom of their pans. Here's one from Primus. The Etapot. And this is a very effective pot. As you can see it's got the concertina heat exchanger on the bottom there. Again effectively increasing the surface area of the bottom of the pan to make it work more efficiently. And then of course Jetboil have a similar kind of arrangement on the bottom of their pans with what they term the flux ring. But the MSR design isn't just about this highly efficient heat exchanger on the bottom. And the people who design this for MSR are real whiz kids with heat exchangers that's for sure. A contribution to its success and efficiency is the radiant burner technology that they use in the burner head. And no matter how I try I can't turn this up. It's regulated to give a consistent level of gas coming through. But like I said this wasn't just about boil times. This was about seeing how effective a burner could be at using the last grams of gas within your gas canister. And doing that in some real world conditions not a laboratory workshop or somebody's kitchen. Using a windshield on your stove really will increase its efficiency. Getting it completely out of the wind will help tremendously. Even winds of five miles an hour will affect the efficiency of the burning of your gas stove. But MSR claim that their stove is pretty much unaffected by wind. That's quite a bold boast really. They claim that it will boil a half a litre of water within a minute and a half. So let's put that to the test shall we. So to make it a comparative test so that we can see how efficient the stove is. I boiled half a litre of water in a Jetboil at the same time. I thought I'd have a real world shootout between a couple of stoves. I've got the trusty old Jetboil here and this is the MSR reactor. Both of these stoves use heat exchanger technologies and I'd be interested to see what the magnitude difference between the two is. So each of these stoves was given 500 mils of water to boil. We'll let the Jetboil carry on. Now I'm not suggesting that the MSR reactor is the best thing since sliced bread. It's clearly a very good stove. It's very expensive. It's quite heavy and it takes up quite a large space in my pack. There are other stoves that I would take on a wild camp long before I would take that particular stove. It's either on or it's off. It's either boiling water or it's not boiling water. That's it's job really. So there we have it. This beast of a stove was always going to be faster than a Jetboil. That was a given. And Jetboil make fantastic stoves. Reviews in a clinical environment with a brand new gas canister have their place. But it was interesting to see what the result would be like when gas was running low in your canister and wind and weather were affecting the efficiency of your burner. And I'm not trying to give a Jetboil a hard time here. Any other stove may have suffered similarly but on minimal gas it certainly wasn't jetting. It was struggling to produce the flame to heat the water and as a result taking over five and a half minutes to boil half a litre of water. The reactor on the other hand did what it said it does on the tin. A minute and a half later you've got half a litre of boiling water and a hot chocolate. What more can you ask for? But there's a very real cost to that efficiency of the MSR reactor. Financially yes it's about 180 quid. Probably can be had for less but it's very expensive compared to most other stoves. It weighs 480 grams so apart from my Trangia it's the heaviest stove that I own. This is the 1.7 litre pot. It also comes in a one litre version but it certainly takes up more space than any other stove that I have apart from the Trangia. This is an older version of the Jetboil but I think a Jetboil can probably be had for about half the price. It weighs about 240 grams and it takes up considerably less space. But I'm not trying to be an advocate of either of these stoves. It's not about that. It was a wet horrible Saturday afternoon and I was just musing about the efficiency of stoves and what they behave like in real-time conditions, real world conditions, where the wind is blowing, the rain is pouring, it's uncomfortable and you're on your last grams of gas. That's all this was about really. I hope you enjoyed it. If you enjoyed this video perhaps you might have a look at one or two of my other videos. Give us a thumbs up, leave a comment and I'd be really delighted if you subscribe to the channel. There's a button for that down there somewhere. I'd be thrilled to bits. Thanks ever so much folks. Take care, be safe and look after one another. We'll see you on the next video.