Will my stove work in the cold, and how much fuel?

2 nights · wild camping · cold but not freezing (8 °C) · gravel and tracks · towns daily

On that ride the planner asks for fuel for 1 day of cooking and gives one reason for it. Answer “How cold does it get at night?” with “Below freezing” — -5 °C — and the day count does not move at all. What arrives instead is a second requirement: a winter fuel mix, not standard butane.

Below freezing is the answer that decides this one. Standard butane stops vaporising around freezing, so it wants an isobutane/propane mix — and the canister sleeps in the bag with you, not on the bike. Alcohol slows right down in the cold, and wood is a plan that fails in the wet.

That is the whole page. Everywhere else on this site a colder answer asks you to carry more of something; here it asks you to carry something else, and the amount is unchanged. A rider who is handed the general answer buys the right quantity of the wrong thing, and finds out at 6am.

Of the 4 answers the interview offers to that question, 1 changes what the planner says about cooking and the other 3 leave it word for word identical — which is the claim, not a hedge.

• Below freezing -5 °Cthe advice changes
• Near freezing 2 °Cunchanged
• Cold but not freezing 8 °Cunchanged
• Mild 15 °Cunchanged

So the step lies somewhere between -5 °C and 2 °C, and that is as precisely as this can honestly be put: those are two answers a rider was offered, not a measurement. The ruleset says “around freezing” and we have not sharpened it, because nobody here has stood a stove in a freezer.

The approaches are the ruleset’s, and so is every word below. Above the step none of them is picked for you — that would be a judgement on taste and budget, which the interview does not ask about. Below it, 1 of 3 is.

• Gas canister

  start here

  Below freezing, this is the only one of the three that reliably lights.

  What it costs you above the step

  Canisters are hard to find in some countries and you cannot see what is left.

  And below it

  Canisters are hard to find in some countries, you cannot see what is left, and below freezing it has to be an isobutane/propane mix — plain butane will not vaporise.

• Alcohol burner

  What it costs you above the step

  Slow, and hopeless in wind without a shield.

• Wood burner

  What it costs you above the step

  Banned or impossible wherever it is dry enough to be a fire risk or wet enough not to light. Blackens everything.

1 of the 3 is reworded, 2 are not. That asymmetry is the nearest thing to “which stove for winter” that can be said without naming a product: the ruleset has something new to say about one of them and nothing new about the rest, and the ones it leaves alone still carry the downsides they always did.

The same answer reaches the second cooking requirement as well, which is the part that gets forgotten: Two lighters below freezing, carried in a pocket rather than a bag — a piezo igniter often will not spark when it is cold, and a stove you cannot light is a stove you did not bring.

The other half of the question, and the incumbent skips it entirely. The figure is not a function of how long you are out — it is a function of the gap between shops, and the nights only reach it through that gap.

Read the rows rather than the cells. “Every day” holds one figure across all 4 answers: 1 day, however long you are out, because you buy dinner. “Rarely, or not at all” holds 4, one for every answer, and reaches 11 days. The nights answer is the same answer in both rows. It is the resupply answer that decides whether it reaches the figure at all, which is the part a general answer cannot condition on and so leaves to you.

It stays a count of days because that is what the ruleset knows. Turning it into a mass or a volume would need a burn rate, and nothing in this product has ever measured one — so the number you take to a shop is the number of days, and the conversion is a question for whoever made the stove.

Changes how much

How often do you pass a shop? Through it, and only through it, so does how many nights you are out.

Changes what kind

How cold does it get at night? It adds a requirement and adds not one day.

Decides whether there is a stove at all

“Do you want to cook?” — and answering “No” takes the whole requirement off the list. That one is yours. This product asks it rather than deciding it, because whether a hot meal is worth the weight is not something a ruleset can know about you, and a page that told you would be guessing.

The temperature answer is the one worth watching across pages, because it does opposite things on either side of the range. It leaves the fuel count identical at all 4 answers, while the water figure this site computes from the same input takes 2 values and only moves at the warm end — 4.5 L at 15 °C. Cold changes your stove and not your bottles; heat changes your bottles and not your stove.

Measured

Nothing. This page has no measurement on it, which is the honest difference between it and the one about water — that answer needs a photograph of your frame, and this one needs a single answer about the weather.

Derived

Every figure above: the day counts, which answers cross the step, and which of the ways to cook the ruleset picks. Each is a function of the answers named beside it.

Reported

Nothing. No sentence here is quoted from a person or a maker, so there is no source to cite. If that changes, the quote arrives verbatim with a URL and a date or it does not arrive.

What is deliberately absent: a mass for anything, a volume of fuel, a burn rate, a boil time, a pack size, a price and a brand. None of them was ever measured here, and the temperature at which a fuel stops working is left in the words the ruleset uses rather than sharpened into a figure nobody took.

The interview asks 10 questions and no account. 3 of them decide this one, and the plan that comes out names them beside every line it gives you.

Answer them →The requirement in full →