I love cooking.  I love fire.  I love camping… so you can imagine how I feel about camping stoves!  I first used a petrol camping stove when I was about 14 on a two week canoeing trip in Germany and was so impressed at the power and how long they lasted on one (cheap!) filling of petrol.  Added to that, they have so much more of a primeval man-tool feel to them than those pussy gas stoves.  They flare yellow when warming up, roar when they burn, and require a complex, well timed ritual to get them lit… what more could you want to satisfy the Ugg in you?!

The Primus OmniFuel and the Optimus Nova+ are both great stoves – the OmniFuel is mine (I’ve had it for about 2 years now) and the Nova+ is brand new – it belongs to a friend, but he ordered it to my address, so I got a chance to try them both side by side!

Out of the bag

Both stoves weigh about the same, and are made up of the same parts (burner, fuel line, pump, a tool, and a bag).  I really like the way the Optimus bag is made – it is a sack, with pockets inside, but you can unzip the side of the sack to open it out, making access and packing really easy.  With the Primus, everything fits in the bag, but only after some fiddling and shoving (that mesh material doesn’t go well with the spiky arms…).

The Nova+ bag and storage is just that bit neater and better.  One up for Nova+

The vulnerable parts

These are precision devices, which will be used in a rough environment – they shouldn’t break!  But… I think both manufacturers have some strengths, and some weaknesses:

Burner

The arms on the Nova+ do an excellent job of protecting the burner when it is packed away – wrapped around it, no amount of banging could dislodge it.  The OmniFuel doesn’t have such good protection – when the arms are folded back and the burner is in its stuff sack and being bashed around in your luggage, the burner head is exposed: on mine the soldered joint at the bottom (connecting to the valve) broke once.  It was of course replaced at no expense, but if it hadn’t been on the last day of our 3 week holiday it would have been very annoying!  On the other hand, the pipe/valve assembly going into the stove is very well protected on the OmniFuel, but sticking out without any protection on the Nova+.

Fuel pump connector

It’s a small detail, but still… The Nova+ has a nice bayonet “EZ” connector – just push’n'click – it’s quick, it’s easy, but… it looks more vulnerable to grit and grime!  They have provided rubber caps to put over both ends, but I’m doubtful whether they will be so effective.  The OmniFuel has a screw connector which allows the bottle to stay still as you screw it on.  The connector looks a bit more rugged, and easier to just blow any grains of sand out of, but… it is more annoying when connecting than the bayonet.

The Pump

I’ve not opened up the pumps, but on a mostly subjective level I prefer the Nova+ design.

The Nova+ is steel and aluminium, and feels that bit more robust than the OmniFuel.  The fuel pipe is soft plastic – an advantage is that it can’t be damaged as easily as the thin metal one on the OmniFuel, but I’m guessing that in hot weather it might flop, and make turning off the stove a bit more difficult when the tank is full. Most of the time the pumps are left attached to the bottle, so vulnerability here isn’t much of an issue. One thing I’m missing on both pumps is a clip to stop the pump coming out. So often it’s happened that while packing away the fuel bottle, I have to depress the pump, putting just enough pressure in the tank so that when I next connect the stove I have a small fuel spill… and besides that, if the pump piston comes out in transport, it could easily be bent and broken.

So for this section again – it’s a head-to-head: they both have some merits and some flaws.

Nice design

Though they are in essence the same stove, there are some really nice little design features I noticed which show some creativity on the part of the engineers:

• The Nova+ has a really cool magnetic cleaning needle to clean the valve with – just wave the tool under the burner and it cleans itself!
• The OmniFuel has three different valves – optimal burning for propane, petrol and diesel!
• The Nova+ has the flame adjustment lever (or rotator) near the pump – well away from the pot and wind shield making it easy to access and adjust.
• The flame cap (is that what it’s called?  I’m talking about the metal plate which spreads the flame). On my OmniFuel a recurring annoyance is that it sometimes falls off in the bag. Loosing that in the dark can be a drag.  The Nova+ has solved this by making a small cut in the burner, and wrapping one leg of the plate through the hole – you can still clip off the other two to access the valve, but it won’t fall off unnoticed!

For “clever design”, the Nova+ wins!

Cooking

Both stoves work on the same principle, and the burners even look nearly identical, so you’d expect them to do the same.  I tested them using petrol (”white gas” for Americans) on our balcony, boiling 1 liter of cold tap water from the tap in my Primus EtaPower pot.  I didn’t use a wind shield, because it was a wind still afternoon.  Air temperature was 17 degrees centigrade, and I defined “boiling” when the bottom of the pot was covered in little bubbles, and they started rising to the surface.  The OmniFuel is rated at 3000W, and the Nova+ is rated at 2850W, and they both boiled the 1l of water in about 3:30 minutes.  They’re both noisy stoves, but one thing did bug me about the Nova+ – regardless of the setting, it always had a slight stutter or warble.  It sounded as if the fuel flow was accelerating, and then being slowed again at about 2Hz.  I’m wondering if the magnetic needle could be vibrating, or being sucked up with the fuel flow to cause that? It didn’t seem to affect the performance, but it didn’t sound right.

They both have grippy rests for the pots to sit on, but the OmniFuel ones are just a bit bigger, and they don’t have those little spikes at the end.  I guess the spikes could help stop the pot slipping off the end, but if (as in my case) the pot is just about the same diameter, they can be an annoying lump to trip the edge of the pot on.  Both stoves are similarly sturdy and stable.

A small win for the OmniFuel for being better for bigger pots, and sounding nicer.

Summary

They’re both great stoves, both Swedish, weigh about the same, do about the same… and the differences are mostly cosmetic.  If I were to buy again I’d probably go for OmniFuel again.  I find the Nova+ very attractive with it’s neater design, and clever features, but I like what I know, and while I’ll probably never use it, it’s good to know it can burn propane, and might be a bit more efficient with diesel.

Links

• Primus OmniFuel
• Optimus Nova+

More pictures

Growing a business by Paul Hawken

With my current intention in becoming self employed, I’m soaking up all kinds of good advice about how to make a successful business.  This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I’m happy to recommend it on to anybody in business.  It’s not so much a guide how to “grow” a business, as a collection of topics, thoughts and stories which the author found relevant.  It has many good ideas, and guidelines, which I think I can best summarise as “be nice” – to your customers and employees.  It won’t tell you how to run your business, but it might help you realise what is really important, and what the most productive steps to becoming successful will be for you.

It’s an easy read with lots (sometimes just one too many) anecdotes supporting his ideas, and as a result it’s not all dry theory: it’s funny too.  It is aimed at the American reader, focusing on American models and businesses, but I think the business model which he hails would be successful in any part of the world.  Another interesting element is that the book was written in the mid eighties, but many of the points which Paul says are central to a good business are (if not in their entirety) what we know from, and for which we respect companies like Toyota, Amazon and Google – long after the book was written.

It’s true – I haven’t told you much about what’s in the book… for that you’ll just have to read it!

Who wants to borrow my copy?

Many of my friends have already experienced me singing the merits of OSS (Open Source Software), with Linux at its core.  With the latest Ubuntu release “Jaunty Jackalope” (which I upgraded to a few days ago), I thought it’s time to sing some more praise again for my favourite operating system!  If you have heard of Linux, and think one of the following common misconceptions:

• It’s too “geeky” – I want to use my computer, not use the command line to use it…
• It’s really difficult to get it to work…
• I won’t be able to do my stuff on it…

… think again!

I’ve never even tried to pursuade my family to convert… there’s no one else that they know who knows Linux, and I’m thousands of kilometers away – it just doesn’t make sense for them to make the effort to change.  But… when my sister got a netbook for Christmas the price tag won the fight for Linux without me even opening my mouth.  The best bang-for-buck netbook which my father found was an Acer netbook with “Linpus” installed.  Since then my sister (18 years old, great at arts, but not previously known for technical prowess) has installed Ubuntu on it, and is really happy!  If she can do it, so can you!

Why you may ask…?  If your current computer already has Windows, it’s probably not worth the effort, but when you buy your next one, consider that even if you get some version of Windows included in the deal, it’s probably adding upwards of 150EUR to the price tag, and with laptops costing as little as 300EUR nowadays, that’s pretty significant!  That’s not where it ends though – getting legal copies of all the rest of the software you want for your system (Office etc.) will cost a pretty penny too.  If you’re using a Mac now, then money obviously isn’t an object anyway… so go get yourself another Mac! ;-P

The latest Ubuntu comes with Open Office (replaces MS Office), Firefox (replaces MS Internet Explorer), Gimp (replaces Photoshop) preinstalled, and there’s all kinds of other programs which have by now become very stable, and very very competitive alternatives to their fee based counterparts.

What other stuff work on Linux these days?

• Skype
• Google Earth
• a whole host of video and sound editing suites
• Fancy 3D desktop effects – stuff that only Mac users can dream of.
• … and if you really want to use that one Windows program, you can probably install it under Linux with Wine!

The one thing I really love about my Ubuntu installation – I always have the latest version of all the software I use.  Once I decide to install any given program (there’s one easy interface to install/remove pretty much everything), I never have to go checking on a website to see if I have the latest version: the system upgrades (which you can set to happen automatically every day) upgrade EVERYTHING!

Best of all – you can try out Ubuntu without committing and installing – just download the image, burn it to a CD, and reboot your computer with the CD in the drive – it will run the whole system from the CD! And did I mention that most of the free software which runs on Linux also has a version for Windows and Mac too?

If you already are a Ubuntu user, and are wondering about the upgrade to Jaunty Jackalope: I recomend it!  The upgrade worked without a hickup, and though I’ve not seen any wild changes, the few small changes that there are are nice!

As a little aside, here’s how I was converted:

• 1998 – Richard, a Linux guru was living in my dorm and installed Debian on my computer.  It took him about 8 hours.  Sound didn’t work, and the graphics were bad… I didn’t do much with it, and felt sorry for his effort…
• 2001 – I did the final part of my Masters in Munich at the TUM.  My desktop had SuSE Linux installed… I got on ok with it, and set up a web server on it.  It was more intuitive than my previous Linux experience, and much easier than the Sun systems my colleagues were using.
• 2002 – Finished with my Masters in Computer Science, I was working in England for a few months, didn’t have many friends there, but a load of old PC’s from work… this time I managed to install Debian myself, and started doing some Perl programming and playing around with web and file servers.
• Since 2003 – I’ve always had a Linux server at home as a file server and for testing programs out on
• Since 2006 – Because of a job change, I had to buy my first own laptop (up until then they had always been work-owned, and Windows-enforced) – I installed Ubuntu and haven’t looked back since!