I am considering purchasing a single burner propane set up to use out in the garage for canning purposes. Anyone have any suggestions about the BTU rating for an adequate unit that would bring a water bath to boil in the shortest period. Obviously the higher the BTU's the faster but what is a ball park figure that I should be looking at as a minimum. Thank You! Steve

Steve I use a 160,000 BTU high pressure burner and it handles the largest pot I could buy. It will also work well with blanching vegetables for freezing because it heats up fast and does not cook them. Keep in mind when purchasing a burner to make sure you get a high pressure burned and not a standard burner.

Look at item TC01H in the website listed below.

Turkey Fryer,Crab Cooker from Tejas Smokers (http://www.tejassmokers.com/newproducts_page4.htm)

I can and freeze about 500 quarts a year and this is what I use. I would however be careful using any open burner in a closed in area. I prepare everything inside and do the actual canning outside. For Vegetables I fill a large cooler with ice water to cool them as soon as they are blanched and this keeps them from continuing to cook. Hope this helps.
Tony

You can do it from the following constant and a bunch of conversions:

Specific heat capacity water - 4.187 kJ/kgK
=4.2 kiloJoules/killogram-deg C; K and deg C have same slope

Convert say quarts to millileters; 1 ml = 1 cc = 1 gram for water;
Get the weight of a quart of water.

Boiling pt of water = 100 deg C.

K = BTU's/qt-deg C

Burner will be rated in BTU/hr ; Use # qts of water
25 C is room temp; ground temp is about 55 deg F. so you have to use at least 75 deg C

Plug and chug and you'll get the amount of time to raise x quarts of water to boiling given a particular burner capacity.

Assumes no heat lost.

Two flaws in your thinking:

Need to know how much water
Burner capacity is in BTU/hr not BTU's.
Probably can assume high efficiency.

Or look at a typical high power stove burner capacity and go for it. BTU's are independent of fuel.





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