The burner produces a roaring cone of blue fire -- the Jet in Jetboil -- and boil times for a liter of water are close to three minutes. Thats fast. The Helios is designed as a cold weather stove. Iso-butane canisters, while better than straight butane, dont perform well once the cold drops below about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The Helios inverts the Panerai replica watches iso-butane canister, so it can pull liquid, not vapor, out of the can. Plus it transfers that liquid all the way up the fuel line to the burner -- so you get similar properties of a liquid fuel stove but the convenience of using iso-butane canisters.
It weighs just 28 ounces, and comes with a two-liter pot, an ideal size for melting snow.All that is great. Most of the time, it works fine. The system is not designed for cooking -- the flame is so hot, almost anything you cook gets immediately singed. Its best replica watch gift for quickly boiling water. And while we didnt have testing conditions cold enough to test the stoves bottom range, it works well enough above 20F (JetBoil claims that it can go as low as -10F, but because we tested in the spring and fall, we couldnt get below 25 degrees or so).
The push-button ignition is great -- especially since we forgot our lighters after schlepping up to a 12,000-foot campsite a few miles outside of Santa Fe -- and the little sparker is a fantastic backup system. The system is much more stable than the Group Cooking System, and makes a perfectly fine stove in spring, summer and fall (when, frankly, most Ulysse Nardin replica watches people are going to be using it). However, this is a fourth season stove, designed for full-winter conditions -- and there we ran into some problems.(Note: I interviewed JetBoils president, Perry Dowst, for this column, and he promised me most of these problems have been fixed on the 2008-09 models.
