Sven
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I just wrote a blog entry about our choice of the ORIGO stove. It's not my intent to pull traffic away from here so I've cut and pasted it here too:
Other than electric, diesel or CNG stoves, nothing beats non-pressurized alcohol stoves like the Origo for safety.
On Senta II with no generator an electric stove simply isn’t practical so that was not an option for us. We seriously looked at the diesel option as the ideal solution but costs and installation difficulties and maintenance hassles nixed it as an option, even after contacting some of the manufacturers and asking them to convince us ... they didn’t seem interested. When we bought her, Senta II had a CNG stove and oven but CNG is only available in select countries and carrying all those extra SCUBA tanks and the cost made it another impractical choice.
So we went back to ORIGO.
There are a few things worth noting regarding our experiences with the ORIGO stove and oven:
-Heat output
-Oven usability
-Fuel cost
-Fuel availability
-Odor
-CO danger
-Filling safety
-Usage safety
We are often asked if the alcohol burns hot enough for real cooking. The answer is yes. As a matter of fact, we do not use the stovetop burners at a setting higher than 2.5 out 5 because we have found that the heat from the flame licking around the bottom of the pot will start to melt plastic handles on pots designed for open flame cooking ! We can burn our eggs or pancakes with the best of them. We do use pots with a quite thick bottom to even out the heat but we always have plenty of heat.
The oven on the ORIGO is actually quite usable. The oven is small by in-home standards but will accommodate a nice whole chicken. We use the oven for bread-making too and once we had a 9x14x0.3” stone tile cut to put in the bottom we’ve had great results. The stone really evens out the heat in the oven and it also gives it more thermal inertia so the temperature doesn’t swing wildly every time you open the door and let the hot air out. There is no thermostat so you don’t set it and forget it, you keep watching the temperature throughout.
We have found that we use around 1 US gallon (~4 liters) of fuel per month. That’s for a 12-cup pot of percolated coffee in the morning, instant oatmeal, sauteed vegetables or boiled potatoes and fixings for a typical day. That also includes bread making, heating water for soups or coco under way or just boiling the chemical hand warmers to recharge them for the next cold night. The cost of the fuel ranges from $15 to $30 per gallon with $16-20 being the norm.
There was one point in time where the local chandler in Los Angeles couldn’t get ORIGO fuel for over two months and we never found out what the problem was. We got stove fuel from Worst Marine during that time but they too had to ship it in from outlying stores and we paid close to $30 gallon. We have been told that alcohol fuel is not available in the Caribbean so we’ll stock up before going there and we’ve been told that you can burn the local rum (!?) instead but not in pressurized stoves because the sugar clogs the orifices. Not sure if the rum story is a joke or not.
The ORIGO stove fuel burns quite cleanly and to us it doesn’t seem to have too much odor. Klean-Strip SLX Denatured Alcohol is only 1/2 to 2/3rds the cost of ORIGO fuel and it does have a sharper odor that would be offensive without adequate ventilation. We use the SLX most of the time because it is available in just about any hardware store and while we are in warm climates we keep lots of hatches open anyway.
Having good ventilation is critical even if the odor doesn’t get to you. We installed a couple of CO detectors with CO ppm readouts and we were surprised to find that even with one large open sliding hatch over the stove the CO readings could end up unhealthy if there was no breeze. We’ve probably had the alarms go off half a dozen times, sometimes due to a spike in CO and sometimes because of an integrated lower exposure over a longer period of time. Ventilation is of course also needed to lower the humidity produced by burning and cooking but CO exposure is the overriding concern.
The only time when fire safety is a real worry is when filling the canisters. Alcohol has really low viscosity and splashes with ease. No matter how careful you are, if you are pouring out of a 1-gallon can/bottle into the canister you will spill or drip some fuel. We tried using a fuel hose and hand-balloon fuel pump to siphon the fuel into the canister but even that will usually end up dripping some fuel unless you simply don’t fill the canister all the way. The solution is to always fill over the sink and rinse the sink after filling. Water, just a bit of a spray of water will immediately neutralize the alcohol and make it un-burnable. If the spilled fuel catches fire the flame is almost invisible so you need to prevent the risk of any fire in the first place.
Before we bought the stove (our second ORIGO) we scoured the web for articles about burns and law suits and insurance claims involving ORIGO stoves. We came up empty handed. There was one suit where the owner of the stove, according to the verdict, caused a fire by trying to fill an already burning canister from above. In a personal exchange on a sailing forum I also ran across one person who was adamant that a slip neighbor had their galley scorched by a run-away ORIGO oven but when pressed for details he didn’t have any so I suspect it was a pressurized stove or they were not burning alcohol. We should mention that we have had two instances where a stove-top burner would not shut off. In both cases we had a breeze come down the companionway across the stove and we think it deflected some of the heat over the canister top so the canister got warm enough to evaporate too much fuel, which escaped out past the metal plate used to regulate the flame. In both cases the flame would almost certainly have self-extinguished after a bit of cooling off from the cover being closed but we just sprinkled some water with our finger tips and that put it out.
The bottom line is that we are very happy with our choice in every respect and we’ll get an ORIGO the next time too !
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