Butane Stoves: Portable and Convenient Power Outage Cooking

if you're looking for a way to cook your food during a short term power outage a portable butane stove just might be the answer hi I'm Jonathan and Colleen Jones and we are the Provident Preppers during our 30-day grid down cooking challenge I fell in love with cooking on a butane stove in this video we'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a butane stove during a short term power outage along with some of the things that we learned while we were using it stay tuned that's part of our 30-day grid down cooking challenge we have been experimenting with the portable butane stoves and they are amazing and my wife has fallen in love with one it is really important to understand that not all butane stoves are rated for indoor use there's two main categories one is designed for camping and the other one is designed to be used indoors by chefs or caterers in a restaurant type environment if you are going to purchase one for cooking indoors during a power outage you need to make sure that you get the one that is used by caterers sterno makes a great butane stove that can be used indoors one of the great selling points for these little butane stoves is they are so simple to operate before you get started you'll want to read the directions you need to make sure you understand the ventilation requirements and follow them if you have one that needs ventilation be sure that you ventilate also you want to make sure there's nothing flammable near the stove you want to make sure you're on a fairly level surface and you want to make sure that you inspect that fuel cartridge make sure that it is not damaged dented or rusted putting in the butane cartridge is very simple you're going to line the notch up with the little latch and push it into place after inserting a fuel cartridge and closing the cover you will press down the lock lever that engages the fuel canister and makes it ready to use once the fuel canister is engaged you will turn the dial all the way until it clicks and the flame ignites make sure that you visualize that flame one of the things that I noticed is sometimes I would turn it all the way till it clicked but it wouldn't actually light I could hear the fuel hissing out so I thought it was on it wasn't on but I couldn't see it because I'd already put the pot on top and it was a few minutes later till I wondered well it's not warm which meant that I was leaking butane that whole time so I changed my practice and I always make sure that the pot is not on when I do this process because once that flames there then it's actually burning the butane and not allowing it to leak and then you can just adjust the flame for whatever temperature you're wanting to cook at this sterno stove is designed to use indoors and one of the things that it does is anytime you turn this off that latch clicks and it disengages the fuel cartridge to help prevent any leakage the advantages we see in these butane stoves is the instant hot flame it does get hot in a big hurry the operation is very simple even the kids once they learned how to use it they were making quesadillas all the time and it is portable it can go with you in the car or wherever you need to go it can be used indoors or out make sure you select the right one if you're gonna use it indoors though and it is a great tool for short term power outages one of my favorite things about the butane stove is that it cooks popcorn faster than microwave popcorn during our 30-day grid down challenge we became a huge fan of popcorn and I didn't believe her at first so I had to time it i like to measure everything and she was right it was two and a half minutes start to finish for a good amount of popcorn just because this functions really well doesn't mean that it is not dangerous because it absolutely is the things that make it powerful and enable it to cook really well can also be extremely dangerous so be sure that you carefully read and follow the instructions for your particular butane stove they where that carbon monoxide can be generated under certain circumstances and have a carbon monoxide detector with a digital readout handy open flame is always dangerous don't ever leave this stove unattended you'll want to be very careful about fuel leakage butane is heavier than air which means it doesn't dissipate into the air and go away it finds a low-lying area and just hangs out there creating an explosive risk the other thing is fuel storage risks butane canisters can be little bombs so you need to be extremely careful the way that you store them and how they are handled this is one of the reasons why we think it's terrific for a short term crisis but we would not count on it for a long term grid down event because you would have to store way too many of those cartridges and the risk would just be too great for us there are a few disadvantages to the butane stoves and the butane canisters one is that ventilation is required the fuel is somewhat expensive fuel storage has some safety issues associated with it and the fuel is not sustainable in other words when that fuel is gone your stove is really useless yeah it's gone and there's nothing that you can do to make it work now there are things that we can do to conserve the fuel and use that precious butane and make our supplies last a lot longer and we're going to talk about a few of those now the first one is to make sure that you cut your food into small pieces before you cook it the smaller the piece of food the quicker it cooks and the less fuel it will take to accomplish that task if you're cooking something in a pot make sure you use a lid to keep that heat in one method that we love to use for fuel conservation is retain heat or thermal cooking if you click the card in the upper right hand corner it will direct you to a post that will teach you about exactly how to use retained heat but we took that pot that you saw in the previous photo brought it up to a rolling boil and then we tucked it inside this Wonder oven and put that pillow on top and the soup in that pot continued to cook even without adding additional fuel we saved a lot of butane fuel as compared to we had just let it simmer on the stovetop pressure cookers are an amazing tool and if you are not using one strongly consider getting one they cook the food so much faster and with much less energy most of the time in a power outage situation when you are trying to conserve fuel you would not consider cooking dry beans unless that was the only option that you had however by using a pressure cooker to cook those beans it doesn't take much more fuel to cook the dry beans than it does to heat up canned beans and then if you combine your techniques and use a pressure cooker along with retained heat you've got the best of both worlds as you can see we've tucked it into that pillow and then there's a pillow that goes on top but you want to make sure that that rocker on the top of the pressure cooker that you don't tilt that when you put the pillow on top but all I did to cook these dry beans is put it on the butane stove brought it up and tell that rocker just barely started to rock then I pulled it off tucked it in here and we left it on the counter for six hours while we went away and did different things on that day and came home and the beans were perfect and delicious one thing that I love about cooking beans in the pressure cooker is that I can add all the spices at the beginning and I don't have to worry about the salt or tomatoes hardening those beans when we check the temperature of the beans after they've been sitting in there for six hours it was still at 190 degrees which is well above safe serving temperature the butane cartridges usually range between two and five dollars depending on where you purchase them we'll provide some links for you in the description to purchase some one Amazon if you'd like to do that Sam's Club is the least expensive place to buy both the fuel and the stove because they cater to caterers each cartridge will burn between two and four hours depending on the temperature that you're cooking on at a price of two to five dollars each butane is generally about eight to ten times the price of propane if you're using a refillable propane bottle while it's significantly more expensive than propane sometimes for a power outage it sure makes life easier case of butane cartridges was gifted to us by my parents about 10 years ago we don't know for sure when it was purchased we think it probably was around y2k which would make them 19 years old I don't know for sure so I'm saying that they were at least 10 we had stored this case in our garage in this original box and you can see we've used part of them and those are the empty bottles in there but the new ones are still in that plastic packaging these have held up really well we didn't have any problem when we use them I'm not advocating storing them for a long time I'm just showing you that for us this forgotten case of butane cartridges really stored well for a long period of time butane cartridges door best in a cool dry ventilated place away from heat and flame between the temperatures of 32 and 110 degrees and away from oxidizing materials now we have these stored in our garage but our garage will stay between those temperatures freezing can definitely damage these cartridges and if they get too hot we talked about them being the little bums I would never store butane cartridges in my garage if I lived in a place like Phoenix let's talk about bugging out and using a butane stove as your cooking device this would be great if you could bug out in a vehicle or in some type of a camper not so good if you're doing it on foot if you're on foot you need to definitely pick something that is lighter weight and would work better for you but for a short term evacuation where you're able to go in a vehicle this might not be such a bad idea transport the fuel in the upright position keep it cool and dry and do not shake it drop it or expose it to any heat because the butane cartridges can be very dangerous and now for my feelings about butane stoves you're gonna get it just like I feel it they are incredibly convenient and fantastic for a short term power outage however they are not a good solution for any type of long-term event the fuel is not sustainable there are many other things that would do better in a long-term situation as rocket stoves however for the short turn this is my friend the fuel is rather expensive but the convenience kind of makes it worth it butane fuel cartridges the storage is a little bit problematic so you need to make sure that you're being very careful when you store that fuel for more information about butane stoves we have created a post entitled butane stove portable and convenient power outage cooking in addition on our youtube channel we have explored other possibilities for your emergency cooking including emergency solar cooking and cool charcoal cookers take a look as you can see I learned to really appreciate the value of a portable butane stove it's not the answer for every disaster or for a long-term grid down event but it is a really good option for a short term power outage and now for the question of the day what experience do you have cooking on a portable butane stove comment below and thanks for being part of the solution you

Channel: The Provident Prepper

Views: 13,451

Rating: 4.8826666 out of 5

Keywords: Portable Butane Stoves, Butane Gas Stove, Short Term Power Outage, Power Outage Cooking, Prepper, Emergency Preparedness, Power Outage, The Provident Prepper, SHTF, Disaster Cooking, No Power Cooking, Butane Shelf LIfe, Butane Storage Requirements, Retained Heat Cooking, Fuel Conservation, Thermal Cooking, Wonder Oven, TEOTWAWKI, Disaster Preparedness

Id: QGMgoyYHM8s

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019