Alcohol Stoves

There are lots of stories of alcohol stoves "blowing up". Nearly all of them are a cover for operators that did not follow the instructions, or did something outright stupid (like trying to refuel a hot stove). First, water is a good material to fight an alcohol fire but while leaping overboard may well reduce your pain it will leave your boat and cat at the mercy of your stove. Some of the safety benefits of an alcohol stove is that when pressurized you have a hot burning and effective flame, but when depressurized there is no chance of escaping gas igniting (such as with propane). While alcohol can leak, if it falls into the bilge, it can mix with bilge water and not be explosive. Still, with all fuels, handle with care. If you have an older stove, there is a strong chance that the burner plunger seals have dried out and you likely will need a new one. They can be hard to find as few folks carry alcohol stove parts anymore. See if you can pump up the stove and whether it will hold pressure, if you are in any doubt throw it in the dumpster and order a pizza! Now on to the fun part. How to use the stove. It's really very simple, but I'll warn you right now. FOLLOW THE DAMN DIRECTIONS. If you burn down yours and your neighbors boats from this day on you will be known as 'Scorchy' for not being smarter than the stove. Before I tell you how to light the stove, I'm going to force you to THINK about how it works. Alcohol is a liquid, but we want to burn it as a gas. To turn it into a gas, were going to heat it. If not properly heated, the alcohol will come out as a liquid, run all over the place and not burn where we want it to. This is called NOT FOLLOWING THE DIRECTIONS. So how do we "heat up" our stove before lighting it.

1	Pump up the stove using the plunger. Usually 10-20 strokes will do it.

2	Open a burner valve and the liquid alcohol should run out of the burner and collect at the bottom of the stove. There should be a small recessed cup at the bottom of the burner to catch the liquid alcohol. Let this cup fill up, but do not overfill.

3	Shut off the burner. Verify that the level of the burner cup is not rising and the fuel is off.

4	Light the fuel in the burner pre-fill cup. You should have a flame that will rise up and surround the metal burner, heating it. The flame might rise an inch or two above the burner. This is normal.

5	Let the flame BURN OUT.

6	So long as you filled the pre-fill cup with fuel and allowed it to burn out, you have now burned the precise amount of fuel directly below the burner that was measured and designed to heat the burner to a level that will flash liquid alcohol into a gas and allow it to burn that way.

7	Open a burner to low/med setting. You should hear a hiss now, indicating you are getting alcohol gas.

8	Light the burner like any other gas or propane stove.

9	From this point on you have a hot burning stove that will work identical to any other pressurized gas stove such as propane etc... without the fear of leaking propane cylinders on your boat.

10	IF you run out of fuel before you are done cooking. DO NOT do something farm animal stupid such as trying to pour additional alcohol into the stove right next to pre-heated hot burners that are more than capable of causing a fire.

11	If you do not follow steps 1-5, or Step 10, then swiftly move to 12
12	DO NOT go to the bar, restaurant, harbor office etc and loudly exclaim "my alcohol stove just blew up, I was nearly killed", "my toasted cat has left me", "It was the stoves fault, these things are dangerous and they should not be allowed to sell them." Everyone will believe you and go out and buy a propane pressurized stove that really can blow up your boat for real. Worse yet is the butane burners that don't have any gas sniffing features and the very same folks who blew themselves up with the alcohol stove now use the butane burners and store often leaky bottles inside their cabins!
	So....are you brighter than your stove?
Your Nervous Neighbor