Sounds to me like you got a good buy and it will use, as pointed out, any Lindal valve fuel cannister sold world wide. The exact fraction of butane to propane (or butane to isobutane to propane) is not as important as hype would have one believe. And they all burn fine in warm to cool conditions.

The Peak 1 cannister stove 3001 series ( http://www.coleman.com/coleman/images/pdf/3001.PDF ) may be discontinued - Coleman site only shows the F1 and F1 PowerBoost conventional cannister stoves and only the 2 burner ("Expedition") PowerMax stove. Looks very conventional and should be a good above-freezing temps stove for the money. I do not recall what the retail price was on those.

The Powermax stoves rock, BTW. I did pick up the conversion widget for mine so I can use standard cannisters if Coleman ever stops making the Powermax cannisters. Those are liquid feed stoves by design and the cannister has a clunk tube in it to keep the feed liquid.

While you may be able to find a few butane-only cannisters here in the USA, they are not the norm here. Butane will not come out of the liquid state (no gas) around freezing. Almost all cannisters sold in North America are 70-80% butane with the rest either propane or isobutane and propane. Isobutane will vaporize at a little colder temperatures and propane will vaporize about down to -40 deg (either temp scale).

High altitude helps with vaporization at lower temps.

Problem with gas-feed stoves in cold temps is that the propane, being more volatile, boils off first, eventually leaving one with a bunch of liquid butane "stuck" in the cannister. Cooling from "boiling" the butane plus gas expansion from the cannister makes this happen rather sooner than you might expect.

A few stoves are designed to use an inverted cannister (liquid feed; propane pushes the liquid butane out). A close read on some remote cannister stoves (like MSR) reveals that one may carefully invert the cannister to liquid feed in cold weather. All the cannister stoves that *can* liquid feed have a gas generator tube looped into the flame from the burner head - for obvious reasons (to gasify the liquid).

Cannister stove afficiandos have all sort of interesting tricks to coax performance out of gas feed stoves in cold temps. <Yawn> - I will stick to my PowerMax Expert that stays steady in down to at least -22 deg F (as cold as I have used it so far).

Brunton sells a nifty little fold-out leg gadget that snaps onto both standard cannister sizes - makes the stove more stable. I picked one up at a Cabela's recently at a bargain price (on sale) to give to a friend who uses a conventional cannister stove simliar to the Peak 1.

Honestly, I really only trust white gas stoves in extreme cold, but going on 3 years experience with the PowerMax stoves is making inroads on my prejudices. I sure like the convenience of a cannister stove... just back from a 3 day, 25 mile backpacking trip thru a wilderness area (11,000 - 12,600 ft and too darned brief a trip!) - anyway, it was only the second or third trip where I really trusted the cannister stove and I'm about convinced now - getting lazier, I guess.

Suspect you will get plenty of good use out of that bargain.

Regards,

Tom