Paraffin versus Gaz

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ctelfer38

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www.classic-cruising.com
I have worked with calor and camping Gaz cookers for years but am now considering changing ( back?) to paraffin for the sake of getting rid of the gas bottles. I can see the obvious pros and cons for each; but would be interested in opinions - particularly if you have made such a switch - in either direction - and your conclusions thereafter. /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif
 
With care and sense gas is a safe and clean fuel.

Ive gone back to paraffin a few times,when ive found a good stainless twin burner for £10 at a second hand shop,each time ive gone back to gas or petrol cookers and fitted the paraffin cooker to the boat i was selling!

Both times i later found the cooker for sale at a boats secondhand shop for £30 & £55

Parafin suffers from great expense at times and not always good quality,Best paraffin i found in Malta from a tanker at 2 shillings a gallon
 
Have a look on the Liveaboard forum. There is a long thread on cookers in general this week.

I'm a paraffin fan for preference, but they need patience to learn how to get the best out of them. Also the best (Taylors) is twice the price of a regular gas cooker such as a Plastimo, but lasts forever.
 
Another Taylors convert. Had an OE Vanessa without modern safety devices so was worried by the kaboom factor. Have enough upkeep without the hassle of maintaining an obsolete gas system so opted for KIS. Also struggled to find a stove to fill the hole vacated by the Vanessa - the Taylors did it 'champion'. As a bonus reclaimed the lazarette, lost the weight of three cylinders on the end of the boat and added a fantastic looking piece of ironmongery to the galley. Oh yes, and it cooks great!
 
I finally gave up on gas after one of the army training boats blew up. They had all the safty devices backed by military dicapline to see they where used (which I don't have). The accident was caused by slight damage to the thread on the bottle by the previouse user which allowed it to leak combined with some porusness in the locker cause by movement of the bottle. Conclusions - however god your system and unfortunate set of circumstances can cause a problem, if this happens with paraffin you need a fire blanket if it happens with gas you need a body bag!!!

I love my taylors cooker but I do have a small travel kettle for the 'quick cupper'
 
I agree that the taylors parrafin cookers the best! Because it has cast iron plates over the burners to keep the soot off the pans

Problem is a taylors cooker today costs more than a small sail boat!!!And takes a morning to warm the iron plate,once its working,

In about 1980??? Taylors heaters and stoves while being costly well built and in demarnd were not "to" expensive,then they were bought out by rouges who doubled the price of everything overnight and have gone on overpricing ever since
 
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.... were bought out by rouges who ...

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bloody commies are everywhere nowadays. /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

welcome back - we missed you. merry xams and a hippy near you /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 
Just to throw a spanner in the works, we fitted a diesel cooker as a replacement for gas. Generally very satisfied, it use the diesel straight from our main tank, so we don't have the problem of finding gas or running out, we don't, when travelling have problems finding the right gas or the right connectors and it can be used as a heater( if not gimballed). Yes we cant boil a kettle in 5 minutes, so we tend to fill up flasks with hot water at the begining of the day, or at the start of a passage, and we learn to turn it on as we start doing the prep for cooking, so that by the time we are ready the plate is hot, we consider it a small price to pay for the peace of mind.
 
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I finally gave up on gas after one of the army training boats blew up. They had all the safty devices backed by military dicapline to see they where used (which I don't have). The accident was caused by slight damage to the thread on the bottle by the previouse user which allowed it to leak combined with some porusness in the locker cause by movement of the bottle. Conclusions - however god your system and unfortunate set of circumstances can cause a problem, if this happens with paraffin you need a fire blanket if it happens with gas you need a body bag!!!

I love my taylors cooker but I do have a small travel kettle for the 'quick cupper'

[/ QUOTE ]If you are referring to the explosion on 'Lord Trenchard' your source of information as to the cause of the accident is wrong. Someone I knew lost a leg in that accident, and I am pretty familiar with the circumstances of the incident, the subsequent report and its findings. (And by the way Lord Trenchard was a Combined Services boat not an 'Army boat'!)

There were a whole series of errors and problems that caused the explosion. Ironically, if the boat had not had watertight bulkheads installed for ocean going passages, the incident might not have occurred.

Firstly, the bottle was not connected properly. I don't recall anything about faulty threads, but the bottle was sitting in the gas locker leaking. Secondly, the gas locker drain was unfortunately the same size as the plastic sealing cap that new gas bottles come with. A cap had been dropped into the gas locker and had blocked the drain. The gas locker was not sealed correctly where it met the under deck and gas eventually poured over the top edge of the locker into the undercockpit bilge.

The under-cockpit bilge had become part of a watertight compartment and so no gas escaped into the boat to 'smell' and warn those who got up in the morning that there was a problem. (Can't remember if any gas alarm sensor was fitted to this area of the boat or not.) This meant that when the skipper got up and thought he'd start the generator to top the batteries up, he was not aware that he was pressing the button on a starter motor that would arc in an explosive gas mixture.

Despite all the above, I believe that gas is safe if sensible precautions are taken.
 
What about the spirit hobs?

No one seems to have mentioned them on the liveaboard thread either?

We had thought about one of these so that we could do away with the gas?
 
I agree that gas used properly is safe.On my hillyard i has two large gas bottles one French the other Italian,they lived in the cockpit.When i wanted to cook or run the hot water "geazer" i reached up from the galley to turn the gas on.That short pipes and regular pumping and airing of the bilges allowed safe easy clean cooking.

Spirit stoves are safe cheep to run with French alcohol (1.10€ per liter or 5.99€ for a 5 liter!! I buy in one liter bottles and top up a 5 liter can) It is a bit slower to cook and make tea.Though once the first cup of teas made(finally)you soon get used to the small delay, and for some things its better as the flames spread more evenly over the underside of the pan

Price wise i think gas is buy far the cheapest as one large bottle costs 20€ and would be enough to cook and heat water for over a year.

The spirit stove used one or two liters a week and parrafin more!

On a small boat smaller gas bottles are needed and these cost more for less.The gas bottles are heavy large and not always easy to stow where as meths and parafin can be kept in one or five liter bottles and put almost anywhere safely

The only reason im using a spirit cooker is because every country has a different bottle camping gas is VERY expensive and so cant be found easily or at all in the north,where as alcohol-meths can be found (for a price) any where and its easy to store a lot of it (30 liters)plus a 5 liter in use or more when heading for high cost regions
 
trouville,

thanks for that. are spirit stoves fairly clean or do they get soot on the pans etc?

If I could find somewhere more suitable but still safe to stow a gas bottle I would probably keep gas. At present the gas bottle locker is in front of the helm seat. Handy little table but in the way a bit.
 
Read Nigel Calder's article in YM a couple of months back. After years of faffing about with paraffin and diesel stoves he ditched the idea and went to gas instead. As most of us have experienced he was quickly wooed by the convenience of both use and purchase of gas, and realised that simple safety rules overcome all the possible hazards.

Millions of boats throughout the world use gas with absolutely no problems. There are a few unfortunate incidents, as there are with every one of mankind's activities. As a previous lifelong user and advocate of paraffin, there is no way I would go back to it.

As for spirit stoves - I had read many times on these pages of their ease of use, convenience, etc. Only recently did I use one for the first time. Underwhelmed would be an understatement! Not easy to light unless special matches are used, inconvenient to fill, choking fumes given off, slow to boil a kettle, very doubtful about the safety aspects, fuel supplies few and far between - where shall I stop?

Stick with gas, improve stowage if necessary, tighten up on usage procedures and forget the rest.
 
It can be very difficult to install a gas locker in a small boat - one of the reasons I've just stripped my gas cooker out. There just isn't enough freeboard to install a draining, sealed gas locker in a Corribee in a sensible place.
I'm replacing it with a Taylors, after having a serious look at Origos and multi-fuel camping stoves.
 
Bought a 2-year old boat with a Taylors 030L paraffin cooker, but on the delivery trip from S. Coast to N. Ireland the crew gave it a thumbs down and threatened mutiny, if it wasn't replaced with a gas cooker. They found the process of lighting the burners a bit of a palaver compared to turning on a gas tap. It's now sitting gathering dust in the garage. PM me, if you decide to go down the paraffin route and are interested in a 2nd hand cooker.
 
Soot? not really,what i mean is that the spirit im useing s very high quality,but it can soot the pans but not badly

It also depends where your going as summer in the med i dont think id keep a spirit stove because of evaperation and the ease of carrying a say 10kg 10/12€ bottle which can be taken back for a refund then buying another in Italy Spain where ever then you just need a small 500grm camping gas to serve untill the new bottles in place and act as a reserve

As for lighting i use a small blow lamp! then theres no question of it not lighting ditto paraffin though alcohol starts at once parafin need much more help

North of France in general once you pay the deposit for your gas bottle you wont get a refund when you need to change country's its also much harder to get a very long walk or rides the norm. where as alcohols in even the smallest shop for cleaning at a price!!

Im really all for gas inexpensive good cookers with grill easy and clean if only the gas could be refilled then the old alu calor bottles would be ideal

The largest gas bottle i can stow with ease is the 13kg cube but even thats a bit big where as i can drop 6 or more 5 liter plastic cans of alcohol in the bilge

Small boats have different solutions if the taylors dident cost so much??But then its very slow haveing to heat the plate and HOT in summer!

For me the spirit stove (very very expensive if bought new) is the answer, mine cost 100€ as that was the price of the thing i swapped otherwise there about 250€

Ill keep my spirit stove and buy another gas cooker for the med


Just looked up a taylors £1000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.mailspeedmarine.com/ProductDetails/mcs/productID/101665

For me it would be a question of buying a parafin cooker OR a boat not both!!!
 
I was baffled by Nigel Calder's criticism of the Taylor's stove.
Far be it from me to doubt the experts, but I find mine almost problem free. Admittedly I am a simple East Coast potterer, who probably can always get clean paraffin, but I do use the stove to its fullest, and find that, with the application of a little practical nous, it works fine.

Common advice is to use a gas blowtorch to heat the burners rather than meths. I can't do the sums, but my chemical friends tell me that the wee cylinder on the blowtorch holds enough gas to cause a man-sized bang. Though I suppose there's no reason why it should leak, it seems to me to defeat the purpose of having paraffin.

My method involves priming the burners with a 15ml syringe to avoid bringing the meths container near the stove and to avoid spillage. I have a kitchen timer set to 5 minutes. So the method is prime, light, timer on, and light the burner when the timer pings. It works every time.

The price argument is a strong one, however in my small traditional boat it would have been expensive and space consuming to make a by-the-book gas installation. To buy a quality gas stove and have the whole job done professionally was in the same price league as the Taylors, which I could just plonk in.

(I keep a card above the stove with clear instructions on how to use it, and find that even novice crew have no difficulty.)
 
We have a taylors gas stove onboard, I love it! We do have a good gas locker though and can carry large quantity of gas. We used Camping gaz until we got to the Caribbean and have now switched to the American bottles. Stove still working beautifully!
We put a Taylors paraffin stove in our daughters boat. Again excellent and given that there was no gas locker onboard it was a good solution. My only observation was that the oven took a long time to reach high temperatures.
Spirit stoves are a problem in this part of the world where it can be difficult to source the fuel.The delight of parrafin is that it can be found pretty much everywhere, and in a real emergency I understand that aviation fuel can be substituted!!
I have used a diesel stove before and they too are great BUT not in the Tropics! The background heat is too much!

www.gerryantics.blogspot.com
 
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