The Vault Regulars

Monday, May 24, 2010

Optimus Crux stove

I bought the Optimus Crux stove for this trip. I admit that this is the first gas burner i have bought for decades.
I see lots of gas stoves in the hills but i have always used meths stoves. So i thought i would take the plunge and give one a try.

I also purchased the small Optimus pan set with it.

When it arrived from Ultralight outdoor gear, which took 2 days from ordering. Fantastic company by the way. I couldn't believe just how small it was and how it all fitted nicely together underneath a gas cylinder.
It weighed 90 gr.

I purchased a 120gr Go Systems iso/butane mix cylinder and couldn't wait to try it out in the field.

I kept a log of how much water 1 off 120 gr cylinder would boil. It achieved 5.67 litres. I thought that this was a fantastic achievement. I was very surprised, it just kept going.

One thing to take into consideration was the high ambient temperatures which i guess averaged around 20 degrees and topped 29 degrees one day. So for planning purposes i would take off around 20% and work on 1 cylinder boiling around 4.5 litres.

One thing i wasn't too pleased with was the simmering and the controllability of the gas power. When the gas was turned down the regulator decides to go to the absolute minimum it could get without going out.
I always had to check and see if it had gone out or not.

When on high output it was brilliant and very fast. The most water i boiled at any one time was 0.5L and it took just a couple of minutes.
I was also using the Primus windshield which worked very well.

Summarising then, i think there may be better burners out there that regulate finer. But to simply boil water and pack away into a tiny space it cannot be knocked. A bit expensive as well i thought at £45.
It would be interesting to compare how the new Go Systems stove, which looks just like the Crux but costs £25, works out against it.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Alan

    Sounds like you had a great trip in fine weather for the most part. The photos are lovely. Cameron McNeish was planning to use the Vaude tent you mention on the Challenge and, if he did, I expect he'll do a report on it in the TGO magazine sometime.

    Glad the Mug Shots were OK - we must try the other flavours.

    Thanks for mentioning my blog. Stuck at home at present so there isn't that much to blog about!

    All the best to you both.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Gibson, Sorry to hear you are stuck at home whist we are having some hot weather.
    All in all we had a good week. It turned out a little disappointing that we didn't do the Crinkles, Bowfell and Esk Pike as we planned. Sheila hasn't done these. But not to worry we are in the Lakes every 3 weeks so we will have plenty of chances to do them.

    Thanks for the info re Cameron i will look out for it. I saw on Chris Townsend's site that he had used the Lizard also, so he may do a review as well,---- Cheers, Alan

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