When heating up my tent during those cold October evenings here in Norway, I use the 111. However, I am a fan of the Svea 123, but feel slightly worried to use to heat up the tent. I never read about accidents with 123. Any qualified opinion on this?
Only issue I can see with the 123 is if the windshield is left in place and makes the stove top heavy a little vs a 111 that is close to the ground. Duane
A stove by itself is a bad heater. There are attachments that help with heating an area that use a stove.
Open flame from a stove in a confined space is not a good idea. Fairly sophisticated equipment needed to measure accurately, but a CO detector commonly available should sound the alarm. When actually cooking on a stove, the CO levels can rise dramatically, is my understanding. By placing a frying pan or kettle on the stove, it has the effect of "quenching" the flame. No bueno, Amigo! Several deaths have also been recorded by a similar effect, victims defeated safety mechanisms on catalytic or propane space heaters in their attempt to use them for cooking, something for which they are not designed nor intended. Ordinarily the CO levels produced by these devices are almost undetectable, but just as soon as say, a can of soup is placed near the catalyst, deadly levels of CO are produced. Incomplete combustion.
They say alcohol fumes are non toxic. So possibly cooking in the tent with the Trangia rig is safer?* If open flames inside a nylon tent is ever safe. I've burned a UCO Candle Lantern inside a tent, but don't like to leave it burning if I'm out of it. [* Or does that change too when you put a pot over the burner?]
I say stick with the 111 running on kerosene, although care still needs to be taken. I don't know where the assumption about alcohol burners fumes being non toxic came from*. It is unlikely to be based on actual tests. The simple homemade pot burners and trangia style burners run rich and are going to generate a lot of aldehydes (acetaldehyde and formaldehyde from ethanol and methanol, respectively), as well as CO, none of which are all that healthy. *In pressurized stoves the combustion of alcohol is going to be much more complete, so maybe that is the source. Also, while the heater attachments do convert some of the convection heat to radiant heat, there is, of course, no additional heat being generated in doing so. Radiant heat is pleasant, but as already pointed out, there could be some alteration in fuel air mixing which may or may not affect the combustion efficiency. I'd be more worried about the bounce back of radiant heat on the stove itself; not much of an issue with a 111 kerosene stove, but with a Svea 123??
Several issues. Short version IMO is to not use stoves for heating tents and, instead, carry a warmer parka and sleeping bag. Longer version... 1) All fuels produce carbon monoxide (CO) when burned. CO can kill through a form of suffocation when in a contained space. People get dopey, then drowsy, then fall asleep, then die. This is equally true of all fuels including kerosene, white gas/naptha, automotive fuel, alcohol/methylated spirits, butane, propane, and wood. 2) It is common practice for mountaineers to cook in their tents due to horrible conditions outside (sometimes with the use of a hanging system). But, great care must be used to ventilate the tent. But, cooking typically requires a relatively short burn, particularly when using just-add-boiling-water dehydrated meals. Melting snow is the one exception. Cooking in a vestibule is always preferred over cooking in the main body of the tent. 3) Whereas cooking takes a comparatively short burn, heating (typically) relies on longer extended period of burning, which increases the risk of CO poisoning. Related, most every fuel and stove design gets more volatile and dangerous on prolonged burns. MSR style stoves start to leak at the pump. Butane canisters can over heat and go bang. Alcohol can reach a boiling point and "erupt" out of the burner. And to the point, the Svea 123 fuel tank can over pressurize and vent through the safety release valve on the filler cap (if you're lucky - otherwise bang!). 4) While all fuels produce CO and thus a risk of CO poisoning (short term risk of loosing consciousness), different fuels produce different other compounds when burned. Some of these have longer term risks such as cancer associated with them. For example, Optimus used to assert (maybe they still do?) that automotive fuel produces more carcinogens than white gas/naptha. But this has to do with long term exposure and not the reason to heat a tent with a stove or not. CO poisoning is a much more immediate concern. My standard winter camping tent is a floorless pyramid style tarp/tent combined with a bivy sack. I regularly use my Svea 123 inside this tent to cook with but I'm sure to vent the door. I had a climbing partner nearly kill himself and his tent mate (not me) by cooking inside of a similar tent that was all buttoned up. He was using an Optimus Hiker but that is irrelevant. The key problem was that his tent was closed. Any stove would have caused the same problem. I hope something here helps. I love cold weather camping but I rely on my clothing and sleep systems to keep me warm, not my stove.
My only concern using a 123 to heat with is the possibility of running it dry and scorching the wick…
The only Winter camping I've done since Scout days has been our Big Tent campouts, using a Cabelas Alaknak 12'x20' outfitters-type tent with 4-Dog wood stove. We routinely sleep 8 in the tent. The wood stove is of course one with a chimney, and it does not present a CO threat. We've used it overnight for heat countless times. This is, of course, a wholly different thing than a stove without a chimney. And a long way from a Svea 123!
Space heating heck yeah! This is my jam. I'm a cold weather camping kind of guy and I've built myself an EXCELLENT yet HEAVY, hot tent. I've been thinking about heating my tents for a looooong time now and I've come up with a lot of answers and issues. For starters, space heating involves longer run times, a larger fuel tank is always a welcome. Waiting for things to cool down between refills leaves you with more time sitting around being cold. As an envious non-owner of a 111, I would say stick to that over the svea (especially if the 111 doesn't have a cotton wick) Sometimes I get impatient, I would much prefer refilling a hot stove with kerosene than white gas, it's safer and much less dramatic of an endeavor. But, you like your svea, you want to heat your tent with it sometimes, and you want to know if you can safely! That's a different question. Short answer is yes* but only if you leave the stove as is, unmodified, without any heat drum or reflector or windscreen etc. The svea will safely run from full to (almost, but not fully) empty with no issues. Especially no issues involving fireballs and burn injuries. But there is one serious condition! The svea can not run safely for that long with a device that is reflecting heat back onto the fuel tank, this will result in overpressure, and if that SRV trips while it's in your tent, you are in BIG trouble. As a space heater, the svea is only good for heating air in it's unmodified condition, but heating air (convective heating) is extremely inefficient when compared to radiant heating. Radiant heating involves heating a thin sheet of metal until it's red hot, this red hot metal emits infrared radiation, which heats any object it strikes, as opposed to convective heating which generates hot air that rises upwards. Radiant heating heats in all directions. That heat dome that someone else posted is exactly that, it's FAR superior in heating a cold camper sitting in a tent, but since radiant heating heat in all directions, that means it even heats downwards, towards the fuel tank. By nature of the design, the svea fuel tank is extremely vulnerable to this form of heating, and leaving a brass heat dome on top of it for prolonged periods of time has a potential to be very dangerous. I ran into the same issue but at a slightly larger scale using a BAT 45/2 and heat drum. The contraption looked great, it worked great but the heat being radiated towards the tank was SIGNIFICANT. To the point where I deemed it unsafe to continue with the project. I personally use a Coleman 502 with a heat drum. But all of these fall into the category of "unvented space heater" in which the space heater is exhausted directly into the space that is being heated. Now this is where chemistry must get involved......I'll explain that in my next post
