All: Took me a while to post this as we are in the midst of the brutally short and intense subarctic summer season, the only time of year where it is at or above +15C, so we can paint outside, glue outside etc! This is the tiny alcohol stove season, or camping with the Kifaru para stove in the MEC Snowfield tent as a spike camp, so won't be using the Arctic Stove Head until Oct. or so.... Enjoy!
All: We've had a run of -30C weather with the windchill, so wide-mouth thermos dinners out on the land, rather than stoves. Wind dropped today, only -13C or so, so I did melt snow with the MSR Arctic stove pump today, melted 6L of packed snow into 3L of hot water for lunch. Carbon felt plumber's pad as a windbreak, instant noodles and Minestrone dry soup mix in the wide mouth thermos. Not sure the MSR stove head is in good shape as it seemed stuck on Simmer rather than Flat Out even though I had the new-to-me stove pump valve wide open, and I did add pressure 3 times by pumping... Note the blue pump seal of the Arctic Stove Pump Head. Not sure if I cleaned the the wire-armoured fuel line out well enough last spring as towards the end of the burn it did seem to warble up to higher noise and output, and was noisier. Hm... I must admit I found myself thinking, ''I'll bet the Meta-50 with alcohol could do as well with less bother''...Hm... Sunset in the mountains at around 1430PDT here, so long twilight periods, lots of blue snow...
Yes, it is pretty. Today we had just enough of a wind, 2-3kmhr from the N that it kept the ice fog from forming rime icing on the trees, but I'll save images of that for another post!
Fantastic environment for stove use! Hovering above freezing here & our first 2" of snow this winter is melting. I'd love winters like yours! I'm sure my old Trangia has displayed a similar sneer! Given their properties & suggested upper temp limit I reckon those O-rings may be silicon. Interesting stuff.
looking at your picture your whisperlite seems to be running in a state of underburn because of a clogged generator, i had a similar problem two weeks ago, eventually sorted it by doing a heat and quench on the vapouriser and a good scouring out with the wire and wd 40 - it was worth the effort and the stove now runs great - if the crinkle washers on the burner are glowing red then you have an underburn not sure i could cope with such extreme temperatures
