Portable Kerosene Stove for Picnic and Possibly camping

I have finally gotten the time to visit the shop to buy my Butterfly brand portable pressurized kerosene stove. It is a rather simple self-contained device that has its own pot stand, fuel tank and stove head in one robust solid construction.

Its golden brass fuel tank is exceptionally good looking as an ornamental display if you just want to keep a piece of history in your living room.

Fuel
As its name suggests, it is a kerosene fuel stove. The instruction manual suggests that you use top quality kerosene and strain the kerosene before pouring it into the fuel tank. This is important because the jet that shoots out the kerosene to the burner head is very fine. A clogged jet will affect the flame pattern and generally the amount of heat produced.

I bought my kerosene from Home-Fix and it cost $3.40 for 500ml. It is rather expensive considering that petrol costs $2 per litre. This means that kerosene is 3x as expensive as petrol. Kerosene stoves seems a little out of place in this region since there are petrol powered camping stoves and the petrol is easier to obtain than kerosene.

Pot size
The construction is so stable and versatile that it can take your average family sized pots without any problems. These stoves are said to be exported to countries such as Indonesia, possibly for everyday cooking.

How to use - priming and ignition
Before the stove can be used, there is a need to heat up the generator tube which vaporises the kerosene because it does not burn as a liquid and have to be in gaseous state in order to burn. It is a slightly tedious process here. To heat up the generator tube, a more flammable liquid, alcohol, is used for the initial burn. Alcohol fires up instantly and cleanly. For me, I broke up small pieces of solid fuel in place of alcohol because alcohol is very expensive - a 100g small bottle sold at a pharmacy costs
as much as $6. Because of this priming process, it is not cost effective to start up the stove unless you intend to cook continuously for some time.

Nearing the completion of the priming stage, the vent screw is shut and here comes some vigorous pumping to pressurize the fuel tank. As soon as enough pressure is generated, the jet pumps out gaseous kerosene that burns as an beautiful efficient blue flame at the burner head.

As with most other liquid fuel stoves, this one sounds like a mini jet engine. It is not exactly very loud, but it is way louder than the LPG household stoves that we are used to.

My thoughts
It is a beautiful little stove that belongs to a different time. We have come so far that the most advanced, convenient and powerful stoves is also the cheapest. A full LPG gas tank costs $30-40 and requires replacement about 4 months of daily cooking. Cooking via electricity is also very cheap and even be operated in a badly ventilated indoor environment as it does not produce any nasty gases and is completely silent.

Nevertheless, the old kerosene stove is portable. There are still instances where such a stove becomes useful such as picnics, car/motorcycle camping, fishing and possibly even for travelling. But an event such as this would be centred around the stove due to the inconvenient starting procedure rather than being part of the experience.

In south east Asia, you'll be hard pressed to find it useful when there are so many cheap eateries that very delicious food that is part of the experience itself.