From: "Philip J. Rosch" <pjr@netsense.net> Subject: TWL: RE: beore you buy a " camper" stove for your boat >I think there is a lot of marine marketing that is simply FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) designed to support an absurd price structure to permit a limited volume supplier to survive. The things that I believe define a good quality propane marine stove are: 1. Stainless steel box and frame construction throughout. 2. The use of rust or corrosion-resistant materials for fittings, burners, etc. 3. Stove top design that prevents cookware from sliding off the stove. 4. Piezo-electric ignition for burners as opposed to pilot light/match ignition. 5. Thermocouple safety shutoffs on all stove, oven, and broiler burners. 6. Physical size that conforms to typical marine galley counters. 7. Mounting support and attachment design that make it easy to install in a typical marine galley. 8. Gimbaled construction available for sailboats or boats that can benefit from this feature. Some of these features will be found on stoves designed for non-marine use, but probably not all of them together. And of course the gimbaled aspect is probably not important to most powerboaters. The pricing of marine equipment is, I suspect, a lot more complicated than we tend to assume. As with aircraft hardware, it's easy to assume that since it's for a boat, and boaters have money, the manufacturers automatically price it sky-high. I wouldn't be surprised if this philosophy factors into the equation in at least some cases, but there are other considerations, too. The market's not very large. I presume there are far more propane stoves sold for use in RVs and campers than for boats. The typical RV or camper owner may be less demanding in terms of construction and design quality than the typical larger-boat owner. I don't know this: it may not be a factor at all. Manufacturers are generally in business to make money for the people in the company and the investors. The construction of a quality propane stove incorporating all the features listed above is not inexpensive. I've had bits and pieces for our boat made up by a machine shop, some of them quite simple, and I've learned the cost of materials and labor is not particularly low. This isn't turning out shirts in Bangladesh for Wal-Mart. Then there's the issue of insurance. Things that have the potential to do expensive damage or hurt or kill people tend to force their manufacturers to carry a sizeable chunk of liability insurance. This issue caused Cessna to stop making their single-engine general aviation aircraft for well over a decade, and while they've since resumed on a limited basis, the cost of the new planes, which incorporate more or less the same design and construction as the old planes, is astronomical. Much of this is due to the insurance costs Cessna has pony up to cover potential lawsuits. In our current environment, if a thermocouple fails and a burner blows out and you don't catch it and the propane seeps down to pool in your bilge and you hit the starter on an engine and your boat blows up, the survivors will more than likely sue the crap out of everyone they, or their lawyers, can think of, including the companies that made the stove, the starter motor, the boat itself, and probably even the company that last filled the propane tank. In our effort to avoid taking responsibility at all costs, we have created an environment where anyone who makes or does anything that could cause just about anything to happen has to assume the worst and insure themselves as best they can so a claim won't put them out of business. It would be very interesting to know how much of the cost of that Force 10 stove or Freedom 25 inverter or gel cell battery is goes to paying the manufacturer's liability insurance. So when you combine the factors of small market, demanding customers, high materials and labor costs, liability insurance, and the need to economically support the company personnel and investors (if any), you can end up with a $1,500 stove. Every day in my job, I am surrounded by the issue of "do we build it here or do we build it over there to save costs?" The "over there" is generally Japan, China, India, etc.) The same people who howl about the export of US jobs to other countries also howl about what they have to pay for shoes and stoves and airline tickets. If people don't buy your products, it doesn't matter how much you might want to preserve US jobs. And since there's no question most people these days put price before all other considerations, the choice a manufacturer eventually makes is pretty much pre-determined. Even Wal-Mart has figured this out, and they have quietly buried the "support US manufacturers" philosophy espoused by the company's founder a few years ago. Wal-Mart has become the world's largest retailer, and today very little of their merchandise is made in the US. So if you want a $600 Force 10, they're going to have to make it in Tibet. I'm not sure I'd want to be the person announcing that decision up there in Richmond, BC..... C. Marin Faure GB-36-403 "La Perouse" Bellingham, WA