Gear

The MSR site says this will be with us in April but does anyone have an idea how much it will weigh and cost? I'm guessing it'll be a fair bit more than the Jetboil GCS.

Also - can you actually cook stuff with one of these or is it simply a swanky mountain top kettle?

Just googled it and found these:

(1) comparison with Jetboil (warning, pdf file)
(2) from Trailspace.
(3) and 'out of stock' already. Hmm, to me that means it was 'in' stock before it becomes 'out' of stock. But it is not yet available.

Will it be a Jetboiler-boiler?

I have a test sample that weighs 590 grams.In an initial test in the kitchen it boiled 1/2 a litre in 1' 45" using an almost full GoSystems cartridge, which is very fast. However I haven't used it outside in wind or measure fuel usage yet. The pot is large enough for cooking for two and too large to really be a mug. It's wider and therefore more stable than the original Jetboil. Full test report to appear in TGO sometime soon - probably in the May, June or July issue.

£100 plus too, I heard!

Jimbob if that is the price in the UK they won't sell any, and they will just be repeating the mistakes Jetboil made when they first came to this country.

Heavier, twice as much for a slight improvement over the Jetboil sounds like market suicide to me.

I may contact them and try and confirm the price, and then blog about it.

I haven't had a UK price yet. In the States it seems to be $150. The Jetboil Group Cooking System is $110 so I would expect the Reactor price to be high. I doubt MSR expect it to sell in large numbers either here or in the States. Not when the MSR Pocket Rocket costs $35/£30. However the fuel efficiency should mean that the extra cost is covered quite quickly in fuel cost savings if the stove is used a great deal.

F&T have got it listed (not in stock) at £109.95 so, yeah, not cheap.

Over priced and over here what a shocker

I love my jetboil!! :-)

Saw MSR Reactor at trade show in Friedrichshafen last summer - amazingly convincing. It boiled 2 litres of water while 'competitor' failed to boil one and for one of the litres the stove was sitting in a tray of ice with a fan blowing on it (to try and pretend it was outside on a cold wet day). It also carries on working even when gas pressure gets low. Retail price was given as £120. Weight as 595g.

Good to hear they are more economical on the gas - although I'll still not be using a cartridge stove any time soon. Never was happy with those empty hunks of metal these things produce.

More interesting to me is the research going into instant lighting, lightweight kerosene stoves being done by MSR & the US military.

http://zenstoves.net/Petrol.htm#CapillaryStoves

http://www.natick.army.mil/soldier/media/fact/food/miwh.htm

In my book speed does not equate to better.

"Weight as 595g."

Ouch. Specialist use, maybe if you were setting up a base camp?

But can you actually cook with it?

I realise this is a pretty elementary question but do the Jetboil and Reactor just boil water or could I actually put food in the container and use it like any other 'non-integral cooking system'?

I use my jetboil with boil in the bag stuff and of course dehydrated food. I have the group pot so I can fit the food eg: wayfarer bags straight into the pot to boil. I've also used the solo jetboil mug to cook a wayfarer meal in the bag. Works great.

I have used the Jetboil to make porridge and to cook quinoa or cous-cous, so it seems to work for these 'boil and simmer' meals for one.

It seems that the MSR Reactor does appear faster but also less efficient - from the same cartridge the Jetboil boiled 28 quarts and the Reactor 24 - not a huge difference but sounds like they must use a larger burner to burn more gas / faster.

Also the Reactor is quite a lot heavier (and probably more bulky) - although that is mostly due to the larger pot.

The point is - they are both good - both a lot more efficient than conventional stoves and therefore cheaper to run and you could argue 'lightweight' (assuming less or smaller cartridges needed).

RRP is £110 due mid april.
Barking Mad I'm suprised at your findings on efficency - what conditions was it in? from what I've seen the MSR is quicker, more efficent & struggles less at altitude / in the cold / wind.

Can't say I'm about to run out and buy one though. I think other manufacturers may improve on the idea.

I think that those figures sound abit like those on the backpackinglight.com website in a review/test they did.

Interesting. As a heating engineer, carbon monoxide is close to my heart, but hopefully not close to my customers.
The MSR stove failed it's carbon monoxide emmissions test. I can't imagine someone being gassed in their tent, but it's a strange one nonetheless.
Here's a thing about it.

A good way to tell if you have carbon monoxide being produced by an open flame is if the flame goes softer in shape and a pale yellow. This goes for your boiler, gas fire and your camping stove as well.

As interesting is the fact that over the past few weeks, a series of articles was published in which CO output of different types of backpacking stoves was measured including the MSR Reactor. The results for the Reactor were not good (and that's an understatement). CO-levels of 100 to 200 ppm seem to be considered as a more or less acceptable limit during short periods (minutes). While the Reactor had a reasonable output of 50 ppm on full power, the CO-level reached 1000 to 1200 ppm while simmering. This level could be lethal.