Coleman Performance Gas simply didn’t work at lower temperatures, despite being well within the stated usage range. Remember, Coleman claims to have “tested the gas to an evaporation temperature of -5°c and a usage temperature of as low as -20°c. It appears you’re using a stove that screws onto a gas canister with the valve of the gas canister facing up.

We are only able to comment on the testing we have done in controlled conditions and hope you have confidence to continue to use Coleman gas in the future. Anyone who is happy to go cold-weather camping with known-to-be unreliable critical kit needs to give their head a wobble. I very strongly urge you to avoid their products, because it seems to me they may well have a quality-control issue. In fact, I’ve camped out in colder temperatures before, and the stove worked fine, also using Performance Gas at the time. During my camping trip, the gas I was using for my stove only worked long enough to warm a single tin mug to lukewarm.The trouble with butane is that it really performs poorly in the cold, and your gas stove may completely fizzle out just when you’re most reliant on it. At best, not disclosing quite openly the limitations of their product also raises questions about their integrity. Allow me to tell you about Coleman’s response: they refuse to accept any responsibility, and (excuse the pun) proceeded to gas-light me. The failure of Coleman’s Performance Gas simply meant my camping trip was less enjoyable than I hoped for. Instead of showing the slightest interest into why their product failed, when I contacted them (privately) about this, they simply tried to blame me.

To add insult to injury, when you raise this legitimate concern with Coleman, they immediately blame you. My Vango Compact camping stove is rated by Vango as 3000W, and able to boil a litre of water in four minutes. To suggest it’s not compatible as it’s screw on like the majority of lightweight camping stoves is laughable. If you’re going to use a butane/propane fuel mixture and cold weather you’re going to need an inverted canister stove, or an adapter to convert your stove to an inverted canister stove. If Coleman was in any way interested in not damaging their brand name, they shouldn’t have blamed me for their product having failed.

In simple terms, I was massively within the temperature range they claim that Coleman Performance Gas will reliably work at, yet it failed. Coleman’s product failed me, and I gave them the opportunity to deal with that in a constructive manner. WillCycle Supporters help keep the lights on here, and get an ad-free experience for less than 7p per day. We have tested the gas to an evaporation temperature of -5°c and a usage temperature of as low as -20°c. If you read this discussion, you’ll see there are many others, experienced campers too, who also found Coleman’s gas to be unreliable.

Recently, I went camping out on Dartmoor, and overnight the temperature dropped low enough for my tent to be mostly covered in a 1mm layer of ice by the morning. You would therefore expect Coleman’s Value Gas to have less propane than their Performance Gas, and that their Extreme Gas will have the most propane, right? I stand by what I said, and wish to highlight this bit: “ We are defined not by our mistakes, but by our responses to the mistakes.The point is that Coleman may have a QC problem, as the last time I used Performance Gas, is was well above freezing, yet it failed. To be fair, Ed also blamed me, and you implied blame, which raises the question of whether the pair of you works for Coleman in some capacity, and are simply trying to do a not-so-subtle PR exercise to undo brand damage. Remember, at summer temperatures, butane is a better fuel than propane, but its performance nosedives as it gets colder.