A very rambly Connextras follow-up

Still no metal halide or mercury vapor video

A lot of phones have some kind of light meter - I use it to make sure my African violet isn't getting too much light. It can handle ~10k lumens, but direct sunlight is closer to 100k. Oddly, the red sunlight through forest fire smoke is ~30k lumens - where goes the extra sunlight, absorbed or reflected?

Stephen Gillie

Molotovian!

Stephen Gillie

You can write me so we can know more about ourselves?....

Consider putting numbers in the video, when you do the calculations and comparisons like these. You compared several parameters of three things and it's difficult to keep it all in memory. I wrote it all down to see all the parameters at the same time to compare myself. I had the same problem when you calculated (something) with the heat pumps a few videos ago.

M@trixX

Thinking about the preheater cup, our Tilley lamp has a 'bundle of rag' assembly that clips around the generator tube to get it heated. And since the fuel is soaked in to the rag, there's no direct spill risk. The preheater unclips for soaking, lighting and then clips back on to heat.

George M1GEO

If you're using 4 hours of light per night, and one battery will cover that, and you have a charging source (like a solar panel or car) then you can recharge that one battery each day and it covers 100% of your lighting needs. Like if you're spending a week in the woods, you could either bring the one battery and light & charge it daily, or bring a week's worth of fuel, plus the (heavier) lantern. The small green propane bottles can't be refilled - it's said so on the bottle since I was a little kid. Same with the industrial-style longer-thinner tube that's also used for MAPP gas - can't refill those either, only cut them in half with an angle grinder and make art from them.

Stephen Gillie

FWIW, I really enjoy the Connextras videos. Your scripted videos are entertaining as hell, for sure, but the Connextras videos seem more relaxed and more like we're just having a conversation. That might feel "rambly" when you're talking to a camera, but from my perspective on the other side of the screen it just feels like more natural speech.

Circuitmike

I don't really get your comparison from the battery with the can of white gas or bottle of propane... I would say that the battery is more the (expensive) can or bottle, where you put the (cheap) fuel inside, if you used all of them on your camping trip, you don't need to buy new ones, just recharge them. I guess this is also done with the propane bottles? I remember those heavy blue "Camping Gaz" bottles, after use you returned them to be refilled, or you got a full one and they would refill the old bottle afterwards. The lamps with the pumps, I know them in a bit bigger version, we called them "vaporizer lanterns". They were (maybe still are) used during tours in underground old defensive works and caves. I remember the fuzzing sound they made and the typical smell. I don't know if they ran on kerosine or gasoline or something else, only that the fuel was liquid and needed to be vaporized.

MrHammond

Also, I wish you had a photometer that you could use in future videos to directly compare light output between various sources.

alphawhiskey

Listening to this at the gym, so the noise of the air conditioner and vacuums in here makes any fuzz from the dehumidifier negligible.

alphawhiskey

Isn't the smoke from the kerosene lamp coming from the alcohol flame? When you accidentally lit the collar full of alcohol, you said all of the glass was covered in soot. Doesn't that mean incomplete combustion and therefore smoke? Also, it's burning with a more and more yellow flame as it gets hotter which normally means the same thing.

I would recommend visiting the YouTube channel lantern lab to learn more about Coleman pressure lanterns, especially proper lighting techniques for your kerosine lantern. I suspect something is wrong with your dual fuel lantern. None of my lanterns pulse that much at start up. None of them go out during the lighting process. The reason the dual fuel lantern has a bigger generator is simply because it can build up much more carbon on the inside before it clogs. That’s it. Generators need replacement (or cleaning if you know what you’re doing) when then fill up with carbon on the inside, and start blocking fuel flow. The smoke you’re seeing during preheat on the kerosine lantern might be from the alcohol. If it’s 90% isopropyl it will create some smoke. Really you would want to use denatured alcohol for preheat. The peerless mantles are a mix of yttrium and thorium. They don’t truly represent the old Coleman thorium mantles very accurately. The Coleman thorium mantles were called silk lites, and they are readily available on eBay. I have hundreds of them. Thorium does indeed glow slightly green, cerium is added to make the color more white.

One reason why white gas or propane mantle lights are (probably) favored is the nostalgia factor. My dad had one. i still have it, and after replacing the pump, gas cap gasket, and mantles (with yttrium), it runs just as well. The whooshing sound, and startup "wobblies" bring back fishing trips with my dad. Not a significant factor, but someone still makes horse whips...

Mike Bird

Hi Alec, I am one of those guys who do "but sometimes...". I haven't done it with your videos (yet), but my wife (properly) chewed me out this morning, and asked me why I do it. The answer is I'm an engineer, and we all know that the disasters (bugs) happen at the boundary lines. Your channel is a magnet for engineers, so the probabilities are good you'll run into many of us.

Mike Bird

The battery having much less energy storage - enough for like 1 day - but being recharged frequently, is the same concept used to save fuel in hybrid cars. Most Priuses have about 1 mile of battery range. This is constantly recharged through braking and excess engine revolutions, and discharged through acceleration/speed maintenance, and accessories through the 12v inverter. (That same ~mile in battery will run the A/C on a 95 degree day for over an hour, maybe 2 hours if you're in shade.) That battery can store and discharge numerous miles per trip, replacing a large fraction of the gasoline used. And so easily rechargeable batteries enable us to cache small amounts of energy, obviating the need for a large energy store, making the whole system even lighter and less complex. The other side of this is the 100x efficiency difference Alec described, between heating an object until its thermal photons have enough energy to be visible, and shoving electrons across a microscopic gap to make a visible "splash".

Stephen Gillie

The Peerless mantles that I have are sold as a replacement to Coleman #21 mantles, so while they may have a looser weave they are definitely meant for use in these lanterns. And oddly, the ones that definitely *do* have a loose weave (the no-name ones that I put on the propane lantern) do actually appear whiter and brighter. It could be the case that Peerless mantles just... aren't very good, but you can rest easy that I was using what they consider to be the correct mantle for these lanterns.

Technology Connections

I'm not trying to be contrarian here, and I hope I'm not coming off as such. I don't have any emotional or nostalgic attachment to thorium mantles, but it occurs to me that at least some of the ones you tried have a significantly looser weave than the Coleman mantles. I wonder if those were actually intended for use with kerosene lamps, as Peerless seems to market certain styles specifically for kerosene -- I think like the Aladdin, rather than gas. I think I'll have a dig through my workshop junk drawer today because I might have some NOS Coleman mantles dating before the yttrium switch to compare with some fresh ones from Canadian Tire. I remember having to deal with the "rosette" style mantles before and, boy they seemed like a pain to tie at both ends. I also remember that when my Dad replaced a mantle on one of our propane lanterns, he wouldn't burn the mantle before lighting the lantern. He'd turn on the gas and the mantle would form when it was ignited. Later, in Scouts, we primarily used liquid fuel lanterns and we would always form the mantle by lighting it with a match.

The positioning of the handle in the thumbnail runs across your teeth and reminds me of old school headgear for braces.

P D

I know the look you are going for with the hair - the ponytail guy from that HD VHS video (here at 1:00 https://youtu.be/fT4lDU-QLUY)

Can't wait!

Paul Rohrbaugh