Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board MSR Windboiler – Completed Review

If anyone is interested, I have completed my review of the new MSR Windboiler.


HJ

Jim,

I followed along with your review of this stove with some interest. I've used many canister stoves over the years. I've taken both the Jetboil and MSR Reactor to 19,000'+ on Aconcagua and used both in windy stormy conditions up there. I felt the Reactor outperformed the Jetboil to a large degree.

I was curious about the Windboiler and how it would compare with the Reactor. For a person just trying to heat up hot water and doesn't need more than 1 liter at time it seems to work great. For me I'm usually heating up water for multiple people. The Reactor became a lot more useful to me when I got the 2.5 liter pot.

One thing I think is important to point out is you MUST use the MSR pots with the Reactor and Windboiler. One of my former guides (yes I typed FORMER) took a Reactor with her on a trip and tried putting a frying pan on top of it. Yup, true story. This heated up the stove to dangerous levels and the stove automatically shut down. It has a switch that when it gets tripped it need to be sent back to MSR to get reset.

Hi, Kurt,

The Reactor with it's larger pots and higher heat output is still going to be a better option for someone melting snow for a group. The Reactor puts out about 9000 BTU whereas the Windboiler puts out about 7000 BTU. The Windboiler is mainly targeted for solo use (with one pot) or duo use (with one regular pot and one "companion" pot) and more for three season use.

You really do need to use the specified pot with the Reactor or Windboiler stoves. That overheating safety shut off will terminate your stove (at least for that trip). I've heard of people using a radiator hose clamp to adapt a Reactor to other cookware, but that's a heck of a thing to get wrong (a dead stove).

The good news is with the Windboiler, the overheating safety ("Thermal Trip Mechanism") is field resettable.

HJ

Jim did you ever do a side by side test of ALL the stove's

Say Sterno, Zip stoves the old one that used a fan and burnt about anything I think it was called a Sierra ...... , now a few have started using pellet type stoves Esbits or other, and all the old Euro types like the climber model 33 with or without the pump.

I recall a German single burner with 3 wires that fit into the burner cost about 6 bucks and was on the market in the early 70's we would use ski wax fuel canisters for fuel. Then the greatest stove ever was the Hank Roberts model without the hose ,can would plug into a fitting. simple, light and large enough base that it was stable.

My climbing partner for many years was a stove geek: we had a lot of cold food .

Seems like with so many new people doing the long trails and fire restrictions , also not being able to fly with certain fuels or stoves this will be an ongoing issue.

A trick I got from someone years ago was put the water in your dehydrated meal several hours before you plan to eat and this will cut down on fuel and time to boil the smaller amount of water.

Another hint is let people know how long it will take to melt enough snow to fill a liter bottle at say -10 in a stiff breeze? and How fast that bottle will freeze left out.

No, but it's something that I would really like to do. The problem of course is that it would take a lot of time to do a decent job of it -- a LOT of time. Stove stuff is just something I fit in as I can. It'll never make me any appreciable amount of money (well, maybe if someone offers me a book deal, but blogging won't ever).


No disrespect to those who like Sterno, but I probably wouldn't take the time to do Sterno. I have a very low opinion of Sterno based on my experience of it. Regular liquid alcohol is fine (I actually use it a lot), but gelled alcohol (i.e. Sterno) just doesn't seem to work well. If someone has an effective, reasonably lightweight set up for Sterno, please tell me about it.

I probably won't do a lot of old stoves since a) you can't easily get them any more and b) I myself don't have a lot of them.

Rosie has loaned me a Sierra Zip stove, which I started reviewing but then got distracted. I need to get back on that and complete the review.


Good trick. I had read about that one in Colin Fletcher's Complete Walker.

Another good trick is to bring your water to a boil, add your food, and then cover it with your hat. The hat insulates and keeps the heat in. Let it steep for a while, and the food comes out pretty well but uses a lot less fuel than simmering. You may hear this referred to as "cozy cooking".


If the food isn't hot enough/done enough, you can give it another quick shot of heat, turn off the stove again, and let it steep a bit more. The last bit about giving the food another quick shot of heat is not convenient with white gas or kero stoves though.

HJ