Beware of Dual Fuel Stoves

[Music] over the last four years of living van life I've had several camping stoves and I've used camping stoves in my van here to be able to cook it's very important to me to be able to cook my own food not have to rely on going out to eat even though I do go out to eat plenty I also like a stove so that I can make my own coffee my idea is if I have a stove I have options for food and coffee and I like that that's extremely important to me now before I show you the stove that I recently bought I just want to show you the stove that I used to use now this is a stove I've been using for the last several months this is made by a company called gas one and it is a dual fuel stove there's lots of dual fuel stoves out there but these made by gas one run on either butane a little butane canisters or propane a little green bottles of propane and this is actually my second gas one the stove the first stove I really liked but I bought this stove because of the size and because I'm in a rather small camper van I really like the size and the footprint of this stove it's so it's a lot smaller than my old stove while I really like that old stove I just thought that that old stove is a little bit too big for my space now if you're not familiar with these dual fuel stoves they are set to work with butane right out of the box you just open up this little hatch you pop a little butane canister in this area you close the hatch and you're good to go if though you want to use propane you need to use a regulator hose assembly like this one here now most of the manufacturers of these dual fuel stoves give you a regulator hose with the stove with the purchase of the stove so this one came with the stove that I bought from gas one now the trouble with these hoses is they are a proprietary hose so if something were to happen to this hose you would have to buy a new one from gas one you can't just pop down to your local hardware store and get a new one now this has proved to be a huge problem for me my last stove which worked flawlessly from gas one never had any trouble with the stove itself but I had loads of trouble with these regulator houses so I got a hold of gas one I asked them what's going on and if they had any solution the solution they told me was that you have to unscrew the gas bottle every time after using the stove if there's any pressure from the propane gas bottle on this regulator the regulator will fail so I didn't so much like the idea of unscrewing the gas bottle every time I used it that was a bit inconvenient for me so I fashioned a little shaw valve now there's lots of ways to make a shutoff valve and this is probably not the best way but for some reason I had bought these two fittings these are propane fittings same that would be on a gas valve hose one a female one male and so since I already had these all I needed to do was buy a shutoff this is a gas shutoff so what I would do is I would shut the gas off first and then let the stove continue to burn once once the gas was burned out and the pressure was released off of the hose then I would turn the stove off so that problem was solved by just adding this enter and remembering to shut it off before I shut the stove a self off that means that this hose lasted much longer than any other hose I've had from gas one just because I was using it correctly instead of incorrectly so while I am happy to report that my little shutoff valve that I fashioned worked for keeping the hose regulator from disintegrating the stove itself developed a rather odd fault you tell me if you've ever seen a stove do this before so at first I had trouble getting the stove to light and I figured that wasn't a big problem because I could just use a lighter to get the stove lit and that worked for a little while but then I noticed that the stove wasn't lighting all the way around even with the lighter meaning that the stove was throwing unburned fuel out into the van in other words the stove was dangerous and has to go so as soon as I realized that the gas one stove that I just showed you was not going to be a suitable long-term stove I started searching and I searched for weeks and weeks to find a stove that would be suitable for my small space I don't have a lot of space here I've got a very small kitchen area and I need to find a stove that was gonna fit in the confines of my small van here and this is what I found ok so this is a stove I settled on from sportsman never heard of this company before but I found it on Home Depot's websites yeah this stove costs me less than twenty-five dollars including tax I didn't have to pay for shipping because since I bought it on Home Depot's website and then had it shipped to a local store there was no shipping charge so I just had it shipped to a local Seattle area Home Depot one that was kind of convenient for me and I've been using the stove for about a month now and I gotta say well I'm not a big fan of the stove it's a rather simple stove a rather basic stove it works it works every day and one of the great things about the stove is it uses a regular propane regulator this is a propane regulator that you would use for any barbecue grill so if something happened to the regulator or the hose itself I could just go to any hardware store and buy any barbecue regulator assembly and I'm back up and running also if you notice this is the little shutoff valve that I'd showed you before it still fits on this stove I'm still able to use it so as you can see it's on right now I can flip it off once I'm done and I think that that's an important feature I don't think I'd recommend making a shutoff valve this way it's probably a little bit expensive but like I said since I had those fittings already it ended up being a cheap and easy way for me to just get it shut off on this now one thing I want to make very clear is I really wouldn't recommend the stove to anybody I'm not telling you to go to Home Depot and buy one for yourself it's a very basic stove it's cheaply made it's not made real well like the gas one stoves that I've used there's sharp edges on it it's put together cheaply it's just a basic stove it also only runs on propane which I really would like to have that option of using butane if I do run out of propane for some reason usually in my area here propane is much easier to come by then butane is so it shouldn't be a problem and I don't really foresee it being a problem propane is also much cheaper than butane is so propane is my preferred fuel of choice so that shouldn't be a problem in itself the stove is kind of big so I had to kind of come up with a weird way of mounting it I actually mounted it off the side of my work surface here and then to the side wall of the fan so it's actually pretty stable and it's kind of strange but it gives me a little bit more space I've always had a stove sitting on top of a little work table here which means that my other stoves have been sitting up on top of a table which I means that they're close to the ceiling which means I have less room to move around so even though the stove is bigger than any stove I've had before it seems like I have a little more room in here just because of the way I have it mounted and that's kind of because the stove is cheap and just made of sheet metal I was able to just screw and drill through it so there's good and bad things about the stove like I said not recommending this stuff to anybody don't run out and buy one unless you have a similar situation that I do and I don't imagine most people would I don't imagine most people would be happy with this stove but like I said before my main goal is to have a stove that just works everyday and it has worked everyday now on another note I know a lot of you get after me and tell me that I should have a two burner stove for the way that I cook for the most part I just don't need a two burner stove I really need one burner that's what I need I don't need tubers two burners would be not useful most of the time for me just for the way that I cook and also it would take up much too much space in here I just don't have the room as you can see I'm this stove is really oversized for the space and it's only a single burner you can imagine if I had a two burner stove in here I just wouldn't have room if I put everything in here in the van that everybody thinks that I should have I would have to move out because there just isn't a lot of space but like I said having a single burner stove actually suits my cooking style better remember well maybe you don't know this but I was a cook for 10 years so I know how to cook getting by with one burner is just not an issue for me I'm happy with the stove even though I wouldn't recommend any of you to buy one if you're interested you can find one on Home Depot if you're interested in the gas one stoves still I know I've I've talked about them before I've been really happy the last stove I had had no issues with I actually gave it away to a friend and he's still using it they used it on a trip that they took across country just recently here so you know I think the gas one still makes a good stove but I think they make a good stove if you're using them primarily for butane I'm using primarily propane and so the gas one stoves just don't work out so well for me so I'm gonna use the stove until I find something better and actually right now I think this is probably the stove I'm going to be using for quite a while any questions comments anything I forgot to talk about drop them below in the comment section and I will try to get back to you and as always thanks for watching I really appreciate it

Channel: Static CamperVan

Views: 21,929

Rating: 4.8689957 out of 5

Keywords: #vanlife, camping stove, GasOne, butane stove, propane stove, off-grid

Id: 4gwfuyPQVA8

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 07 2020