Kovea does not offer a kero jet for this stove. Recently I came across this review from Craig Rowe. I then decided to test the stove With kero and the std. jet. I would expect the (now) oversized jet to cause a to fat mixture and flow that the burner would have trouble with gassifying. At best I expected an incomplete combustion with yellow flames. And so I had to test this myself. I installed the Trangia adapted burner into my favourite Trangia Triangle, primed with meths for a minute and gave it a go. The stove had been running a minute before I started filming. During the session I turn down the stove and try to get a simmer, turns it back up and then flips the bottle in order to drain the fuelline. In the video you will see the flame flicker, but it does not show the yellow spectre that was present. And so I would have to conclude that it does run on kero with the standard jet, but not without issues. Have anyone else tested this, thoughts?
Combustion looks good. There's no doubting your logic about a gasoline jet being too large for kero, but maybe the jet turns out to be unintentinally optimal for kero and below the optimum size for gasoline. Optimus did that intentionally with the one-jet-for-both fuels Nova. What issues? Loss of a decent simmer setting? John
Yellow flames indicates incomplete combustion. Does not show in the video, but very visible to the eye.
Even with some yellow, I wouldn't be upset with a flame like that if I had a big pot of snow to melt. ....Arch
Ah, so the Brunton Lander is now being sold as the Kovea Booster 1+? Of course it's been Kovea all along, but interesting to see it come out under the Kovea label now. The Edelrid Hexon is also a Kovea product, or at least it's using a Kovea pump and has all the other hall marks of Kovea. So, Mr. Rowe liked the stove quite a bit, didn't he? I've similarly heard from others that this is Kovea's real "hit" in the "universal" type stove category. I've tested their Hydra, which isn't a bad stove (my review of the Kovea Hydra if you're interested), but I don't think it's going to go down in the record books as one of those stoves that really hit on a good balance of things. For example the Svea 123. That darned thing is still being made today, roughly 60 years after it's introduction. Perhaps also the XGK or Whisperlite which have really stood I think the test of time. And the Snow Peak gassie, the GigaPower. The Booster 1+ however has been described to me as a really good combination of features and well balanced. (albeit heavy). I wonder if Kovea would be willing to provide a second jet, one fitted for kerosene use? Or perhaps one could take one from the spares kit and simply peen it perhaps. The really odd thing is that performance declines so much on canister gas. From 5:20 average to boil a liter on petrol (white gasoline) to 8:42 on canister gas. I don't quite get why it would be such a dramatic fall off in performance. Yes, one should have a larger jet for canister gas for optimal performance, but taking an additional three minutes twenty to boil a liter? That just seems odd to me. HJ
I am not familiar with Kovea products so I can not give any knowledge of this. Do you know if this stove has any similarity to the stoves from BRS? If the nipples/jets for the BRS stoves fit this stove there are three different spares to get. BRS number 30 is for kerosene and diesel, number 35 is for gasoline and are for their equivalent to this stove. Number 33 is for their "Coleman" type stoves and works for both gasoline and kerosene, because I have tested on a BRS12A. Maybe you have a similar nipple/jet in your stove. Michael
It was always the Korea booster +1 here in NZ. I have never had any long term luck burning kero on stoves with a micro filter in the jet. I am guess the booster has such a filter, as it was from the same era as the brunton bantam which I know had one.
@hikin_jim It appears to consume gas fuel at a much lower rate: O.5 oz/liter water boiled versus 1.2 oz/liter boiled for liquid fuel. That seems a fair trade-off for longer boil times. Of course, the problem with comparing boil times is that the results can change with different weather conditions.
@cmb56, no doubt it has a jet, but whether or not this Kovea stove from Korea is compatible with the jets from BRS (Bulin of China) is another matter. There could be any number of jets from Optimus, Coleman, Primus, or MSR whose jets might have compatible threads, so this is a good thought. HJ
@itchy, Good point. I suppose that it has to do with pressure. At the point of the jet, both fuels are in a gaseous state, but the petrol/white gasoline has come into the generator in liquid form. The change of state from liquid to gas causes the once liquid fuel to occupy a volume approximately 200x greater than it did as a liquid, which creates quite a bit of pressure. In addition, I seem to recall that liquid fuels are more dense at the molecular level, so that at a given flow through the jet, more atoms would be passing through the portal. In other words, at a molecular level, roughly the same number of molecules would pass through the jet at a given pressure, but since the petrol molecules are denser, a greater amount of potential energy is delivered to the burner. It would be interesting to know if Mr. Rowe's testing with canister gas was done inverted or right side up. I'm guessing it was done right side up. I'm also guessing that running inverted might reduce the difference in boil times between the two. Is there a chemist in the house? My chemistry education is some thirty years old. HJ
@hikin_jim To what I know BRS and Bulin are two different companies. BRS is short for Brothers Deng Jei. Michael
Ah. Interesting. I had it in my mind that they were one and the same, but I don't have anything I can reference to either prove or disprove that, so I'll assume that you are correct. HJ
@hikin_jim I have got the information about BRS from BRS web site. I can not find anything that supports that they are the same. BRS = Jiedeng Outdoor Products Co., Ltd. (Brothers Deng Jei) Bulin = Yongkang Bulin Outdoor Equipment Factory Michael
@hikin_jim I am pretty comfortable with chemistry but not with the physics of fluid dynamics. For all we know the author simply did not crank the heat all the way up with the gas. My point was only that the slower boil times for gas correlated well with the much lower fuel consumption. In fact I was more impressed the reported effiencey of gas than with the slighty faster boil times with liquid fuel (not impressed enough to abandon liquid fuel however). Had the two test been done with a similar rate of fuel consumption the boil times might well have been very close. Enjoy your reports by the way.
Has no one herd of optims Polaris omnifuel then. I don't yet have the Kovea booster +1 yet but the optie does all of these things. Si
Hi Si, Well said indeed. The Polaris runs great on Coleman fuel, Kerosene/Paraffin, and canister fuels. If you opt for the BD Polaris silent cap the stove is very quiet. Cheers, Norman
Well here is the BRS-8 Kovea Booster +1 Knock-off burning "lamp oil". I belive this stove was imposed sale stop from the Directorate for Civil protection due to safety issues. Enjoy, what can possibly go wrong :-)
