![]() The Monarch, with the same flat cut wick as the rest, has a far wider flame - I’m not sure if this is a quirk of the 5/8” wick vs the 7/8” wick, or just something the hot blast type does. A bit of air movement and it’ll start tossing out smoke from the sides of the flame. You can get more light out of it cranked up, but not by far - it doesn’t have the same sort of vertical flame reach of the Blizzard before starting to smoke.Īnd the Monarch can really crank up the flame size before smoking, though only in dead calm conditions. The Jupiter, meanwhile, doesn’t have a huge difference between a reasonable flame and the highest you can get it before it starts smoking. The flame is quite close to the top of the lantern, and that will be obvious later on with the thermal images. The Comet has a very large difference between a medium, reasonable flame, and really turned up - it can fill the full height of the globe before it starts smoking. It’s still fairly white, though the top starts fading to orange. No, it doesn’t get orange turned up - that’s just an artifact of my camera’s auto-white-balance, which I didn’t think to disable for this set of photos. The Blizzard has a generally triangular flame, and there is plenty of light coming out at the normal flame height, though there’s always room to turn it up. You won’t harm the lantern at full flame, it’s just annoying to be cleaning the globe constantly. And, in 2022, the right answer there is probably a flashlight. Despite that, all the lanterns sooted up the globes somewhat when I was doing the max flame fuel burn testing - there’s just no good reason to be running one up that high unless you need all the light possible. So, for each of my lanterns, I’ve taken some pictures of the flame in operation at two different levels - a medium flame, and the “maximum sustained flame” I can get out of them when warm without starting to get the trails of unburned material that lead to smoke. ![]() They (ideally) burn with a far wider flame that puts as much of the flame area in the “hot, white, light emitting region” as possible. ![]() ![]() Most people assume a lantern will burn with a candle-like flame - but they don’t. I’ve never noticed a difference from trimming, and once I’m done playing with them for this post, I’ll probably just let the wicks run and see how long it takes before I notice an issue. But, practically, if you’re burning Klean Heat, you shouldn’t have to trim the wick very often. This can turn into a crunchy layer that blocks the delivery of kerosene. This brings to mind the obvious question: If the wick isn’t part of the combustion process, why do they occasionally have to be trimmed? The answer is that contamination builds up at the top - tars from natural kerosene, the red dye if you’re burning that fuel, or just whatever you get when kerosene is radiantly heated enough. The flame will be much closer to the wick when starting with the globe lifted. There’s a rather large gap between the wick and where combustion starts - at least when operating as intended. While any wick-based burner will burn the vaporized fuel off the wick, as opposed to burning the wick (ideally…), a cold blast lantern makes this process rather more clear than a typical candle. Done properly, your globes should be almost perfectly clear! Not only do the lanterns let more light out this way, they do look a lot nicer sitting on a table with a freshly cleaned globe. So while you don’t have to clean the globe every time you burn the lantern, you should clean it at least every few weeks until you get a feel for what it should look like and can optimize the cleaning schedule for your particular lantern.įor a quick cleaning, running a paper towel around the inside is fine (it’ll come up with more soot than you expect), and that’s good for getting a feel for how dirty things are - but when you really want to clean it, either use a sink, or spray some Windex in the globe and use a paper towel from both ends. You can soot up a globe quickly if you’re not patient on startup, if you run the flame too high, or especially if you run the flame high outdoors - the wind will take a perfectly stable “indoors” flame and make it smoke. It should be obvious, but a dirty globe is just wasting light. I know what the spec sheets say - but I like to make my own numbers when I can. Two weeks ago, I posted some details of my collection of kerosene lanterns, and this post continues along the same lines with more more detailed information about my lanterns, looking at light output, fuel burn, and some thermal images.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |