My cooking gear

[davidbonn]

Yeah, generally I'm okay with the dynamo hub USB charger but it does have some limitations.  You can't expect it to charge very much at all if you are slowly grinding up a long hill.  On the other hand, on a long downhill charging introduces a bit of drag and lets you save your brakes.

I'd really only recommend pressure-regulated canister stoves at this point.  Most of them have decent windscreens and work well in windy, cold conditions with a partially fueled canister.  Fire Maple, MSR, and Jetboil all sell pressure-regulated canister stoves (but not all models they sell are pressure regulated).

[froze]

Yeah, generally I'm okay with the dynamo hub USB charger but it does have some limitations.  You can't expect it to charge very much at all if you are slowly grinding up a long hill.  On the other hand, on a long downhill charging introduces a bit of drag and lets you save your brakes.

I'd really only recommend pressure-regulated canister stoves at this point.  Most of them have decent windscreens and work well in windy, cold conditions with a partially fueled canister.  Fire Maple, MSR, and Jetboil all sell pressure-regulated canister stoves (but not all models they sell are pressure regulated).

I didn't want to spend the money on a dynamo hub, nor did I want the drag.

There are plus and minuses to dynamo hubs and solar panels, I just decided one way was better than the other for me.  If I don't have any sun for a week and I run out of power bank juice because there is no sun for a week, then I'll have to look for an outlet.  But usually the weather is only cloudy for a couple of hours, sometimes an entire day, but the next day the sun is out, I have never been out and seen it cloudy for more than one day, in the winter that could be different but I don't do that stuff in the winter, it's too cold and wet etc for me.

The Soto Windmaster is a pressure-regulated stove.  But the only real advantage of a pressure-regulated stove is in cold weather, I never camp in cold weather, so having a pressure-regulated stove is not as critical.  The other thing that a pressure-regulated stove will do is make the performance consistent as the fuel tank runs low, hmm, I didn't notice that happening with my old $13 dollar unregulated stove, the flame and heat output seemed to be the same down to the last drop of fuel in the can, I don't know!  I carry a backup UST stove that uses fuel cubes in case I run out of canister fuel, the stove and fuel were super cheap at $15 on sale, and it weighs quite a bit less than carrying a backup fuel canister.  So I would use the UST till I found another fuel canister.

[davidbonn]

I've found I get noticeably more meals out of a PR stove than one without.  There are other variables there but for the small (and wildly overpriced) 8oz canisters I find that I typically get three dinners and three breakfasts, while I easily get an extra dinner on that with the PR stove.  With the 16oz canisters that you'd more often use on a tour I get about a week of travel with the non-PR stove and can push that to nine nights with the PR stove.  Small but noticeable.

Also the more expensive Aloksak double zip bags are sometimes useful.  I usually keep a couple of them along on a trip.  They aren't quite as reusable or as durable as the more expensive and heavier silicone ziploc bags, but they fill an excellent niche for keeping stuff dry.  They are in theory odor-blocking as well but I've never tried to use them for that.

[froze]

Strange, I wonder why you get such little use out of canister fuel?  A small 100-gram (3.5-ounce) canister says it will do 20 boils, I get about 4 to 5 days of cooking out it, but you are using a much larger 16-ounce canister and only get 5 days out of it?  I won't pack a 16 ounce it's too big and bulky for me, but everything that I read says it should be able to burn for about 6 hours constantly depending on the stove, regardless of the stove used it should last a lot longer than 5 days.

[davidbonn]

Usually I get six or seven nights (dinners and breakfasts) out of a 16oz  (really 13-14oz) canister.  I think a lot of the confusion I caused here was that the mid-sized canisters are a bit less than 16oz.

The canisters that carry 100-odd grams of fuel weigh about 8oz, and the canisters that carry typically weigh about 13oz and carry 220-odd grams of fuel.

I see where the confusion.  I don't use larger than the 13-14oz canisters that carry 220-odd grams of fuel.

A lot of the difference probably comes down to most of my camp cooking time being in the mountains at somewhat cooler temperatures and heating much colder water (usually water that was recently frozen water, in fact).  And quite a few of my meals require more cooking time than just boiling water.

The small canisters are much less efficient as the pressure drops off more quickly and you are carrying more canister weight for a given amount of fuel.  The overhead is small but measurable.

I usually get 10 to 12 two-cup boils out of an 8oz canister, and 26 to 30 two-cup boils out of the larger canisters (that I formerly called 16oz canisters).  My rule of thumb is that a breakfast usually takes two two-cup boils and dinner takes three two-cup boils, on average.  Or their equivalents because if I cook rice for thirty minutes that acts a lot like several two-cup boils.

This all varies confusingly with elevation, ambient temperature, temperature of the water you are heating, and how elaborate your meals are.  I've had cases where I literally got only one dinner and one breakfast out of a small canister and one time I had a 13oz canister that lasted over two weeks.