Things Were Going Great Until It All Caught Fire

In some recent posts I’ve detailed the process to build an alcohol stove from old beer cans, along with a pot support, windscreen, snuffer and fuel bottle. The only thing left to do, really, is try it out…

Off to the back stoop!

Danger! Fire! Bad! Hurt!

Look, we’re playing with fire here. I shouldn’t need to paint a picture. Plus, alcohol flames are really hard to see in bright daylight. It’s entirely possible to not see any flames at all, even from a big fire. They’re still plenty hot though, even if you can’t see them. Be careful, huh?

A moment’s work had the stove fueled up and the pot stand erected. I lit the pool of alcohol in the middle of the stove.

Fun fact: alcohol flames are invisible. Or pretty close, at least in bright sunlight. The stove is burning in the photo above. There is a trick to make the flames burn yellow by adding salt to the fuel, but I didn’t do that. I deliberately skipped the salt because yellow flames can also be a sign of incomplete combustion, meaning that something’s not working right. Since this is the first time I’ve run this stove I wanted to know if it was having problems. You can see the flame better once the windscreen is on.

Note that I’ve added a small cutout to the top of the windscreen so that I can grab the pot with a potholder and not grab the windscreen.

Eet Verks! Eet Verks! Muahahahaha!

I put on a pint of water to boil. Normally I would use a lid for better efficiency, but I wanted to be able to see (and photograph) when it boiled.

It took about seven minutes to reach a rolling boil (it was definitely boiling at six minutes but not vigorously). Considering that I wasn’t using a lid, and I was watching, I thought that was pretty good.

There was still some alcohol left when I took the pot off the stove.

I didn’t want to waste the fuel by letting it burn out, so I deployed the snuffer. First, I used the pot grippers to lift off the windscreen. Then I lifted off the pot support, so I had unfettered access to the burner.

The little handle made it easy to place the snuffer onto the stove. The fit of the snuffer to the burner could use some improvement, though.

And that’s where it all went to hell

Since the snuffer didn’t fit really well, it didn’t put the stove out right away. The flames licked around the rim of the snuffer and up its sides. Whereupon they ignited the adhesive on the aluminum tape that formed the handle. A moment later, the flames spread to the adhesive on the tape sealing the top of the burner to the bottom. The alcohol also continued to burn.

I had to do something before this became more of an “Oh Shit” moment than it already was. I picked up the pan of water (using pot grippers, of course) and doused the flames. Naturally I was careful not to splash myself, since the water had just been boiling. That worked, and the fire was out.

Hopefully you understand that I didn’t stop to take pictures of all this.

The Aftermath

I re-tested the stove to see if it would work without the tape, and it was fine. It would be more fragile without it, however, so I will probably replace it. The adhesive didn’t burn when the stove was running, it was only when the flames were redirected by the snuffer that it became a problem.

The snuffer needs a redesign, but I’m not going to tackle it right away. In the meantime, if I overfill the stove I can just let it burn out. It’s not likely to be more than a nickel’s worth of fuel anyway.