Searching for Stove Fuel

A digression from our look at plastics, and how to minimize their presence in our lives - this is about our search for the proper fuel for our alcohol stove, and what we learned that you should know.

We had several reasons for choosing to buy a non-pressurized alcohol stove for our galley. Safety - alcohol is one of the safest fuels, one that can be dispelled using water. Availabity of fuel - at the time, we could find the proper fuel on sale in hardware stores in much of North America. Cost - when not purchased through marine stores, our stove’s fuel was reasonably inexpensive. Durability - our stove needs only refilling and cleaning, and there is little to wear out or need replacing.

When we left for the Atlantic islands - the Azores, Porto Santo, the Canaries - we expected to be able to find stove fuel relatively easily, and knew that if we did not find exactly what we were looking for we would at least be able to find substitutes. In the end, substitutes were what we used, looking for the highest percentage of alcohol possible in whatever form of alcohol we purchased. Our difficulty finding the right stuff may have been partly because of our difficulty asking for what we needed; but part of it was because of the substitution of methanol for ethanol as the type of alcohol being sold for marine stoves.

Methanol, ethanol, what’s the difference, they’re all alcohol, right? Well, as it turns out, wrong. Our first clue was when we consulted my brother, a chemical engineer, about the different alcohols, and he asked that we avoid using methanol.

Methanol is very toxic - not just when burned, but when it sits around waiting to be used. Chemists treat it with respect, handling it carefully and avoiding breathing its fumes. And yet it is being sold as fuel for marine stoves, which are generally used in enclosed spaces by people who are unlikely to be aware of potential problems.

To further confuse matters, the ethanol based fuel which should be used in those stoves has a variety of names, some of which refer to the customary use of a small percentage of methanol in the fuel to make the alcohol too poisonous to drink. Depending where you are and who you are talking to, ethanol with 5% to 10% methanol mixed in may be called methylated spirits or metho, and is therefore sometimes confused with the similar sounding methanol.

With the growth of the interest in ethanol as a fuel there seems to be a move to regulate its cost and distribution, affecting its use in other markets such as for stove fuel. Since our return to North America we have found denatured alcohol replaced by methanol on hardware store shelves, with the methanol clearly labelled as marine stove fuel. We have found ethanol based fuels, but they are much more expensive now and not as widely available.

Does this mean we will change our stove, perhaps switch to kerosene, diesel or propane? We have taken a serious look at these alternatives. However, kerosene and diesel are petrochemical products, and both price and availability will be affected by this in the future. Using propane safely would require the installation of specialized equipment and increase the time spent on maintenance to make sure that all connections were solid and leak-free. On the whole, even when we have to search for fuel, we still prefer our non-pressurized alcohol stove.