Goshawk ERA Alcohol Burner

this is the era alcohol burner from gos Hawk I've been using it for well over a year now if you're interested in hearing my thoughts on it keep watching all right before we get started I just want to thank gos Haw for sending out the error alcohol burner so that I could share it with you so in order to keep this video relatively short we'll go down to the tabletop I'm just going to give you the specifications for this talk about my experience using it show it with a couple of different pot stand combinations and the testing I did with it and then we'll do a demonstration before wrapping this video up all right so once again this is the gos Hawk era ER alcohol burner it is made in Australia it is made from a hard anodized aluminum let me give you some specifications for it diameter is 2.95 in or 75 millim height 1.96 in or 50 m or millimet weight is 3.52 o or 100 G and it has a fuel capacity of 4 o or 120 ml now you're looking at this wondering is this uh something that could be used is a replacement for a tranger well let me just bring my Trang into the picture and we can do some comparisons so as you can see the trang is a much smaller burner in just about every Dimension certainly in height it is also smaller in diameter and it is smaller in fuel capacity at the same time it actually is heavier by well just a fraction or two but it is a little bit heavier than the error is which is of course quite interesting now having given you those let me just show you what the trangia has that makes it a little bit more versatile in some respects of course it does come with the cap which is got the ceiling ring the O-ring inside prevents leakage of any fuel left inside of the burner from leaking into your pack which is great it does also come with this snuff uh lid or simmer ring it's a combination thing that you can use and work well with the transia the era has need are those well it has a couple of accessories I'm going to show you in a minute that allow it to be used but the reason I show that is the trangia is considered the more versatile stove that we have today and a lot of the other stoves like the Gen 2 uh Firebox Nano actually the full line of Firebox stoves and a number of other stoves a bushbox and all have been designed to take advantage of this feature right here and that's the lip that extends out around the trangia so it can support this burner at just the right height to give you the best pot gap for efficiency sake that doesn't exist on the era so it cannot be used in any way like the trangia for that reason so how can it be used well uh what I found is I could use it in a few stoves like the Nano it just really is way too large then size is everything about the stove and I'll talk to that in a minute because it really it talks about what its mission is all about so how do you use it well mine came with this pot stand this was included with the stove when I got it and the whole point of this pot stand stand is is that it will rest on top of the burner and give you just the right height and uh for efficiency in use you can see there's a couple of notches or not a couple there three of these notches on the sides of this they made up put these protrusions on the side of the burner itself so I can drop it down locks into place and now there works as one unit and that gives you just the perfect pot Gap from the Jets to the where the pot would rest on top by the way there are 10 Jets let me just show you those right now because this is going to be uh something that you'll see in the demonstration in a few moments there's 10 Jets and they are inside the lip at the top of the burner here and they're also facing at an angle so they create a Vortex type of an effect for the flame as it burns I'll be able to show you that when we demonstrate all right so that's great this these two will work together for a pot but I'll tell you right now this is a large high capacity hot fast stove it's not your average stove this is not the one you want to use for a quick boil up of for a cup of tea or coffee this is the one you want to use for boiling mass of water in a large pot maybe even melting snow with that's what this is designed for and there's some Engineering in this I'll I'll readily admit I don't quite understand but there are heat storage units built into the uh inside diameter it has something to do with the uh natural limitations of siphon stoves and I'm not quite sure how to explain that because I'm not sure I understand it myself but it's intended to overcome those natural limitations to make it even that much more efficient so this thing will work well with large pots that require a large amount of heat in order to bring them up to a boil or melt any snow or whatever it is you want to do with it it does not make it a really good cooking stove until now and let me show you what else gos Hawk just recently sent me so this is a uh pot stand that you can use in conjunction with the burner two other pieces came a simmer ring and a snuff and now we have the versatility of the um trangia as well so in order to use it it starts by placing the burner or the ring down on top and now you can lock the two of them together it has little fold in fold out pot supports for a compactness like this as you can see you fold them out and now your pot is at the perfect Gap so now you've got an gred pot that's great what about simmering well that's what this is all about so it's got the central hole there and on the sides there are notches kind of like what there is on the other pot stand by the way these have definitions as well this is the az0 windproof potan and what we're looking at that now is called the az1 module this I say that just in case you're interested in seeing them on the website there will be links in the video description to this as well so this is the simmer ring and as you can see it has three levels you can use use it here or the center or the top and you just do so by placing it down over the top of the burner while it is in use and you can set the height that would give it the highest amount of heat for its simmer then you can drop it all the way down to the bottom or you can lift it into the middle and it will rest at those Heights works very well in fact and I do like it and this also allows it to be snuffed out now in order to use it to Snuff it out while the simmer ring is on and you can do that is you have to drop it down all the way to the bottom that's where this comes in it is a small cap with a silicon ring on it a little folding handle and you just put it on top and it snuffs it out so that you can recover the alcohol after the stove uh cools off now I do want to point this out because I think this is just one uh area that could use a small Improvement there is this folding little handle on the side of the simmer ring and you know it kind of folds down out the way it does a pretty good job the only problem with it is I'm hoping that show up it kind of swings around on that single handle and my issue with that is that it just makes it a little bit challenging when you're trying to lay this down on top of the burner and get it to just the right height adjustment I hoping that will gos Hawk will take my suggestion and put a second one of these somewhere beside it so it looks like a pair of butterfly handles would on a a caner cup or something and then you can pinch them together and it would prevent this thing from swinging around like that yeah probably add a little bit of cost but they could be folded down against the sides of the the uh simmer ring out of the way but it would give it a make it a lot easier to placing this on top as it is it's still functions it's still very effective by the way you don't have to have the simmer ring on or to Snuff it out the snuff ring works just as well without it okay I want to talk quickly about the testing I did with this because this is very relevant to the mission of this burner so let me take this pot stand off put this pot stand on because this is the pot stand I use during the testing so I use the standard test that we like to use for consistency which is two cups of cold water using 1 o of methyl hydrate I use this the AZ zero stand and a 16 cm anodized aluminum pot it had to be larged I use some smaller pots and I didn't get as good a performance It's a larger pots where this is really shines I got a boil of 4 minutes and 20 seconds very very quick very impressive but then again it ran out shortly afterwards at 5 minutes and 33 seconds there was plenty of alcohol to get two cups of water to a boil but it didn't last very long that just gives you an idea how much heat this puts out and how fast it burns but once again it's all about using this with larger style pots so having said all of that there's one thing I want to talk about before we do the demonstration that is gos Haw in their literature on their website claims that you they can get a boil using the same kind of a setup in 3 minutes and I couldn't do I couldn't replicate that the fastest I could get was 420 so I reached out to gos Hawk and asked them about it and they responded and told me they were using a proprietary mixture of ethy hydrate or ethanol and methyl hydrate in a specific formulation that gives it a much more a volatile fuel with much more oxygenation again I'm not a chemist so I don't quite understand it but it's not something that's readily available to the public well it's interesting I'd like to work in that a little bit more to see if if I could replicate that at home but it gave them a much faster boil time even than what I was able to get which I thought was pretty good all by itself all right so the demonstration I want to do is I'm not going to repeat the boil test but I did want to show you this in action so you get an idea what the flame pattern looks like so let me set that up now all right so I I've set the burner up on top of this plate it's just a safety plate that I use when I'm doing my testing so I'll light the alcohol inside it will take a few seconds for it to come to a balloon I'll turn the light off so you can see what the pattern looks like I'll also reposition the camera so you can get more of a top down view for a better view of that flame pattern so I'll just light that up we'll watch it come to a bloom let me turn the light off so right now the Jets have not ignited on the inside of the burner itself but it won't take very long it does take a moment for the stove itself to heat up and I mentioned those heat storage blocks built into this which make it more efficient but it does mean that they do have to warm up a little bit so the Jets are now lighting and uh they're going to take a second before they come to full efficiency but uh they're getting there pretty close so while that's occurring I'm going to reposition the camera and you get a better look at the flame pattern okay I'm hoping that this is coming through through very clearly in the room it's quite dark here um you should be able to see that all 10 jets are firing and that they are ated angle and aimed inwards at the same time that creates a vortex in the flame pattern itself so what you get is as it rises above the burner it's quite narrow in nature and uh it's very efficient in terms of the flam spread if I were to put a pot on this if I could show you that you would see how efficiently it spreads out across the bottom of the pot but once again to get the most efficiency out of this stove you do need to be using a large part then again if you have the simmer ring on top of it then of course you probably could get away with a smaller part but really feel this is best matched with a large pot so that's a good image right there I think that's enough of a demonstration to show how this works let's wrap this video up all right a few closing thoughts for the error alcohol burner from gos Hawk so I just want to point out again that this is not intended to be a replacement or something that will work in the same scope or the same uses as the trangia is it's a different burner for a diff intended to be used for a different reason this is really meant to be used with large pots or pans where large volume is important in a lot of heat especially in the cold I did use this over the winter it does take a few minutes for it to come up to to heat but once it's there it's very very efficient in fact let me just talk about the Heat this has been 3 or 4 minutes since I put the burner Roat and it is still warm and those heat storage units that are built into this are intended to do that they will hold under heat for a much longer time longer than you would think it would especially where it's made of aluminum and that really does help it become more efficient and for me in my experience especially during the winter months so I just wanted to point that out as well so what looked like it wouldn't have been a very versatile burner in the beginning actually became much more versatile with that integrated AZ zero wind screen on top of it and the more recent Edition the az1 modular unit that allows it to be used with a simmer ring I really like that before that uh I found it was great for boiling water large quantities of water or snow but not so great for cooking over well now it's a much better option for cooking but once again I reserve it for use with larger pots okay I think that's everything I wanted to share with you about this burner I'll be putting all the specifications for it and the links where you can take another look in the video description below but if you have any comments or questions about this burner then put those in the question or the comment section below until next time get out and explore and take that pathless travel because it will make all the difference bye for now

Channel: Mark Young

Views: 1,747

Keywords: Mark Young, Shunpyke Bushcraft, bushcraft, woodscraft, survival, hiking, fishing, camping, hunting, foraging, DIY, homemade, make it yourself, cooking, plant identification, wild medicinals, medicinal plants, edible plants, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Blue Mountain Birch Cove Wilderness, product reviews, primitive skills, firecraft

Id: C39aTzTepw0

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024