Different approach to simmering alcohol stove - MYOG #4

I have tackled the issue of simmering with an alcohol stove by simply using a smaller burner after having tried trangia style simmer rings and such without much success.

There are many alcohol stove construction videos on YouTube but I have never seen one that relates the surface area of a burner to its burn time for a given volume of alcohol. I have found this to be true (almost) regardless of construction type. Maybe this relationship between volume of alcohol burnt in a given time is obvious but nonetheless its worth stating.

For boiling anything over half a liter of water my first choice is a trangia storm cooker but anything less and a trangia is massively over powered even with the simmer ring. I know quite a few people successfully use a trangia with small volumes but I'm not one of them so I build my own smaller stoves. I have experimented with adding simmer rings and similar devices to my homemade stoves but found them to be inconsistent in their results. Therefore I use burners of different surface area to obtain rapid boil and simmer.

I welcome your comments.