Fifty years ago, Coleman stoves and lamps only used naphtha. Today, their devices can use gasoline as well. What’s the difference? Does one produce less carbon monoxide than the other? Does one produce a hotter flame? Less odor?
Kerosene certainly smells “better”, is less inflammable, and has a slightly higher energy content per volume. The downside, I suppose, is that it takes longer for things to heat up and get going with the fuel vaporizing properly.
Sorry for the confusion: there is also “light naphtha” (as in your Zippo) sold by Coleman as white gas or camping fuel; it’s just gasoline, but without additives, lead, benzene, etc. Wikipedia says it is a mixture of cyclohexane, nonane, octane, heptane, and pentane.
DPRK has covered the difference between white fuel (naphtha) and gasoline.
There is a generator part in these stoves, which essentially is a brass fuel line that goes over the flame before feeding the burner. My guess is that 50 years back you had lead in gasoline that will breakdown and progressively coat on the inside of this brass tube and the jets/valve leading to reduced performance or clogs.
I still wouldn’t use the stove on regular gasoline because it contains ethanol and will destroy your seals. If you can find ethanol free gas (some places sell it) then you will be fine.
Both should produce approximately equal amounts of carbon monoxide once the fuel is heated. Gasoline blends vary from season to season while White Naphtha is pretty consistent. A summer blend of gasoline will contain “heavier” components.
You can tell Carbon Monoxide is being produced when the flame is yellow - it will produce soot as well. Since the fuel is preheated to a high temp, once hot it burns pretty much like a gaseous fuel producing very little Carbon monoxide.
Depending on the blend, ethanol free Gasoline will potentially produce a hotter flame if you took a thermocouple measurement but you can’t tell with normal use. It’s not like the temperature difference between natural gas and butane.
Unless there are leaks, both ethanol free gasoline and white naphtha will produce similar odor when burning.
If you have a spill though, white naphtha will smell less (especially in your backpack).
A lot of backcountry types prefer the flex fuel to the propane only ones as lugging canisters around can be a bit much.
But 50 years ago, Coleman stoves and lamps were commonly called gas/gasoline pressure stoves/lamps (by my parents and friends of my parents).
And yes, later the gasoline we used was “white gas” when we could get it – called that because when they started adding led to gasoline they added dye to indicate the difference – but in 1970 we were also using ordinary leaded gasoline in our pressure lamps, because that was all we had.
The confusion, which I also fell to, is that the Greek name “naphtha” has been applied to everything from crude oil to “most of the inflammable oils obtained by dry distillation of organic substances”, so gasoline for sure, but, especially if you survey different countries and languages, everything from Zippo fuel to ligroin to kerosene to diesel.
So “white gasoline” is not such a bad name for the specific product, unless someone goes ahead and dyes it. Did the instruction leaflets that came with the Coleman stoves 50 years ago (only) use the word “naphtha”? I no longer have the instruction manual for my 30-year-old Coleman “multi-fuel” stove, but I am positive it mentioned gasoline and kerosene by those names. I also have a little MSR stove, and that one came with a table giving the names of various fuels in French, German, Japanese, Russian, etc.
Btw, according to this table, the amount of carbon dioxide released per unit amount of energy is roughly the same whether you burn diesel, kerosene, gasoline, or other similar products.
It’s good marketing to say you can get fuel for your lantern or stove at any gas station rather than having to go to a store that sells sporiting goods to get a can of “Coleman Fuel” aka “White Gas” aka naphtha, so they market dual fuel models at a premium price. The problem is commercially available gasoline has all kinds of nasty additives that are necessary for engines but not for camping equipment that tend to gum up the gas generators and aren’t something you want to be breathing and cooking around. Supposedly the gas generators are able to take gasoline without gumming up, but I had to replace mine on my “dual fuel” lantern after only a few dozen hours. I then switched to naptha and had no further problems.
My camping days are over so I’m not sure how LED technology compares, and obviously you can’t cook with LEDs. But with the high energy density of liquid fuels (the same thing that makes them so good for powering cars) you could just top off your stove and lantern and not worry about bringing extra for your trip.
Using gasoline will require one to clean the stove fuel system more often.
Bolding mine.
Can you please tell what are these “nasty additives”? I have worked on many refineries and their blend formulations but don’t understand what you are talking about.
There is a Catalytic Converter in all cars that treats the gases after combustion. If there is nasty stuff in the gasoline, the catalytic converter will stop working and the car will not pass emissions tests.
The problem with small engines and camp stoves going bad is Ethanol added to gas due to the farmer’s lobby. Buy ethanol free gas and you will be all set.
White naphtha is just a proprietary formulation. I suspect you may have more dangerous compounds like benzene in white naphtha than regular gasoline.
As I understand, and I wish I had better words for it, it gasoline contains a larger ‘assortment’ of compounds, while naphtha is much more ‘narrowly’ refined. Gasoline also contains additives mostly for cleaning of the car fuel system that is not necessarily meant for a stove.
True modern cars have a pretty good feedback system to get the air fuel ratio correct to combust everything either in the cylinder or in the catalytic converter given the expected fuel. Stoves not so much and it only has one chance to combust everything. It is also common to spill a bit of fuel in the beginning to prime it, which will off gas VOC’s till lit and burn rich when ignited.
Simply not true as you present it as flex fuel stoves world wide suffer the problem of premature fouling when using pump gas without ethanol. Ethanol may also contribute to this, but even back in the day of carbureted cars without ethanol it was needed to clean them or or rebuild them due to fuel fouling the ports. Yes ethanol in gas has it’s issues, and some are political, but you vastly overstate the blame here as in gasoline would always be perfect and the only issue is this additive.
And I suspect those compounds burn more complete and eave less residue in stoves then pump gas. You have your experience to back you up in the industry and I have mine in the back country.
The MSR stove absolutely came with a cleaning kit, as well as a different jet nozzle to swap in when using something like diesel fuel instead of ordinary (white) gasoline/kerosene. No manufacturer recommends using automotive or other fuel with additives, as far as I know; as Mdcastle points out it’s just (for now) available literally everywhere, while portable propane cylinders or even clean kerosene or pure alcohol might not be.
Re. LEDs, I never thought about using an electric stove to boil water while camping; you would have to factor in reliability in cold/hot/wet environments, but for applications like backpacking the energy density of batteries is not even close. For illumination, LEDs are fine (and more efficient than incandescent or halogen bulbs) because you only need a couple of watts, rather than kilowatts like your stove, so it’s not a problem carrying a small rechargeable battery or two.
That’s an interesting question, but the safety datasheet for the Coleman formulation at least does not mention anything like that, only the (cyclo)alkanes listed in Post #3. I don’t have access to equipment to detect what else may be in there that they are not reporting.
I have used a small immersion heater to boil water while hiking across Spain on the Camino de Santiago. In that hike I was staying in hostels (called albergies) so had access to electric power, plus it may not be acceptable to use a open flame stove in many of them. I got it because I appreciate a hot cup of coffee when I wake up and it is not always available early in the morning as they like to sleep later then I wanted to leave. In that application it worked very well, however in a backcountry setting I doubt a electric stove would work well. In that they do have chemical stoves that one adds water to to activate and that can be used to heat food and boil water which has very small inroads in the backpacking community, sometimes it’s a only option in areas with fire bans, though I guess a electric stove would also qualify but I have never heard or seen anyone using them in the back country.
For lanterns? Much better, no need to muck about with a mantle that crumbles away if you whack it wrong.