This is by far the single most important specification about how powerful a steamer is—or isn’t—telling you how much water the steamer can turn into vapor steam in a period of time. And it’s obvious that to make more steam, you need more heat, or BTUs (but more on that later). A stronger burner will produce more heat and therefore be able heat up faster and keep up steam production during usage. Using less fuel means producing less BTUs or power (kcal/hr or kilowatts) and therefore it will take longer to reach full pressure/temperature and it will be harder to keep up with continuous output. We point this out because Fortador makes it a point to claim you will use less fuel with the Fortador yet somehow have a more powerful steamer. Also, the burner that the Fortador is powered by is documented to be less powerful (see the “Burner Power” section for more info).
Commercial steamers use the weight of the water that is converted to steam to measure Steam Production, so you’ll see this commonly measured in pounds/hr or kilograms/hr. This is related to BTUs since a BTU is the amount of heat required to raise 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit, again pointing out that the power of a steamer’s burner is directly responsible for the power of the steam.
One simple way to measure Steam Production is to measure the amount of water that is refilled into a boiler over a period of time while being used at maximum output. To estimate this, you can take the fill rate of the boiler Water Fill Pump (usually measure in cc/min) and measure how often the water pump is filling in an hour under the steamer’s maximum output. The pump’s fill rate, or flow rate, can also be seen as a limit to how much water can be made into steam. For example, if a steamer’s water pump flow rate is 1,050cc/min (or 1.05 kg/min, which equals 63 kg/hr), it’s safe to say the steamer could not produce more than 63kg/hr of steam because the pump can’t pump any faster than that.
FYI, the max flow rate of the Optima’s Water Pump is 4,500 cc/min, which is could supply up to 270 kg/hr of water, but that would take 167,858 BTUs and assume that the boiler absorbs 100% of the energy and has no heat loss, which is impossible. Even with our patented boiler and burner system and a burner that produces 161,672 BTUs/hr, the Optima can generate 89.5kg/hr of steam. We point this out because the math can’t be faked even if the specification could be.
