|
Annie Hill wrote:
Arne Kverneland wrote:My guess is that pricking the jet just before shutting down, with the burner still hot, was less hard on the needle.
That could well be so. It wasn't something that ever occurred to me.
On the other hand, I was less lucky with the burner in Johanna’s Taylor heater. That one also had an Optimus burner, but not of the same model as those in the Optimus 155 stove, so regular attention was needed. Frankly, that burner could be a real pain.
One of the things that you learn, when you cook with kerosene, is that you are dealing with something that has personality. Nearly always there is a 'good' and a 'not so good' burner and you find yourself lighting the good one first and using it for preference. Then, one day when you have two burners going, you discover that they have swopped roles for no apparent reason and start using the other one for preference until it happens again. It all adds variety to life.
Harrumph. Cooking with kerosene is better than cooking on a coal-fired range - but only just, IMHO.
Luckily, the world is moving on, and we have better choices of cooking fuels in the normally-gaseous hydrocarbons, or alkanes - methane, propane, butane - or the liquid hydrocarbons near the top end of the fractions that come from disti lling crude oil - pentane, hexane, heptane - that are the constituents of naphtha(white gas). Petrol/gasoline is mostly composed of the alkanes heptane, octane, nonane and decane. We no longer have to go down to the heavier fractions from decane onwards (the lighter end of kerosene). Generally, the more carbon atoms in the alkane molecule, the harder it is to get it to burn easily and cleanly, which is the thing that ought to concern us when we're cooking aboard a boat. Moving across to the alkyls or alcohols, only methanol and ethanol are of any interest as fuels, but they are of just as much interest as the alkanes. I would say they are of more interest now, as we humans try to move away from petrochemicals and towards fuels that can be derived from renewable biomass.
|