As I Xi It

Since the post about my impromptu stove, I seem to have developed a bit of an obsession with testing out different hand sanitizing gels and built up a mini stove kit.

That delightful Aladdins cave also known as Poundland, tend to have a veritable selection of hand sanitizers at low low prices. I picked up a few bottles and also some small stainless steel pots.

It seems that the runnier the gel, the easier it is to ignite and leaves less of a gooey deposit behind.

A visit to Blacks turned up a solo cookset and I also ordered a Ti stove off eBay for a few quid. It claims to be 13.5g and seems mighty small and light to me. I also managed to dig out a small metal tin which used to contain mints that I had picked up from one of the many careers fairs back the in day. It made an ideal recepticle to hold the gel and once used, I could pop the lid back on to stop the residual goo from dripping all over my bag.

Since it was snowing today, I tested it out in the garden and noticed a few things -

1) You can’t tell if the gel’s lit or not, you just cannot see the flames, unless you stick your hand over the top to feel the heat. A bit dangerous really, not for the accident prone. To solve this, I sprinkled a few grains of coarse sea salt (NaCl) onto the gel. The sodium when burnt gives off a yellow flame indicating whether it’s “on” or not, a bit of GCSE Chem for you there. It doesn’t leave any soot behind. Addition of salt also separates out the ethanol from the water and seems to enhance the performance of the gel. I actually saw larger and more vigorous bubbles in the pot.

2) Making a windshield from the snow without gloves leads to very cold hands.

3) It takes longer for the water to heat up while in the cold outdoors than on my desk. Not surprising as there was a bit of a breeze outside this morning.

4) It’s pretty good at making boiled eggs and heating up baked beans. As this set up isn’t that hot, food tends not to get burnt onto the pan which makes cleaning a lot easier.

5) I miss real camping.

The whole kit packed together is quite compact for what it is. I could easily take it with me out photographying out in the wildness for a quick hot brew.

So, I was thinking about disaster preparedness this afternoon. What to do if I needed hot water and there was no kettle or cooker about. This is what I came up with -

Yes, I am that resourceful!

Heats galvanised steel mesh red hot.

Hot choc.

It’s basically the metal casing from a used tealight, a tealight holder and some bent galvanised wire mesh. I used some ethanol based handgel which I’d had for some years (it’s de-gelled and gone liquidy now, that’s how old it is). The metal casing was filled up to just under 1 mm from the top.

I never got a vigorous rolling boil, the heat output just wasn’t all that much. It took around 10 minutes to get to a gentle simmer with 300 mls of water in.

The handgel burnt pretty cleanly, no sooty residue left on the underside of my mug. Despite the handgel itself having a slight perfume aroma to it, it was more or less odourless when burnt.

In an emergency situation where you needed a quick fix, it gets the job done.

I picked up a Spork today. Simple, light and oh so useful. Well, I perceive it to be useful otherwise why would I have brought it? I guess I can now leave my metal camp cutlery behind. Incidently, it’s made in Sweden much like the Fold-a-Cup I picked up while I was in Abisko, Sweden earlier this year. I didn’t intend to go with a Swedish theme. I brought it in yellow just because it’d be easier to find should it wander around my cavernous backpack.

Everyone should learn how to do some knots, you never know when they might come in useful!

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