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Posted by Bill S on March 6, 2007 at 12:42:30 pm EST
In reply to How much fuel to carry? posted by rideforever on March 6, 2007 at 2:59:19 am EST

As the others noted, the best thing is to measure the fuel consumption yourself. This covers your own stove and your own style of cooking. I would strongly advise doing this before a 3 week, no resupply trip.

A bit different suggestion for a first pass at the fuel consumption that will be somewhat more accurate -

Get a kitchen scale, preferably one of the digital type. Fill the fuel bottle and put the pump in. Weigh the fuel bottle, full, and with pump. Next, using the pot you will be using on the trip, fill the pot with 1 liter of cold water (try to match the water temperature you expect on the trip, since cold water takes longer to boil than typical tap water). Light the stove using your personal "standard" lighting technique, and boil the liter of water. You might want to time this as well to get an idea of your food preparation time. Now weigh the fuel bottle and record it. The difference is the fuel per liter of water boiled. Repeat this several times without refilling the bottle, starting each time with cold water, and remembering to cool the pot. As you add these up, you will get an average fuel per liter boiled.

I find that on trips with breakfast and dinner being the hot meals, I use about 1 to 1.5 ounces of white gas or kerosene (that's weight, not fluid ounces!) per day per person in 3-season usage (getting liquid water from streams), and about the same for compressed gas. In winter when melting snow it runs closer to 8 ounces per day (this even held on Denali, something like 9 gallons for 10 of us for 22 days).

When teaching backpacking courses for Boy Scout leaders, I tell people to plan on 2 ounces per person per day, in part because the youth tend to be a bit less efficient with fuel, and in part to allow for spare fuel.

Of course YMMV, depending on whether you are doing rehydration of freezedry or gourmet-level cooking.

Replies

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• Re: How much fuel to carry? - rideforever 02:36:12 03/07/2007
  • Re: How much fuel to carry? - SteveTheFolkie 13:30:28 03/07/2007
    • Re: How much fuel to carry? - Chumango 22:06:10 03/07/2007

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