Originally Posted by
Starchild
Part of the problem is the fuel is cold, and holds the cold through thermal mass and evaporative cooling. The fuel is 'protecting itself' from the heat much like a ablative heat shield on a spacecraft reentering the atmosphere as fuel evaporates and that forms a protective and insulated layer limiting runaway evaporation. This is good when you use the stove in the conditions that it was designed around, however outside those temperature ranges it works against you.
In that you are just getting less fuel to evaporate to burn till the fuel warms up, but with that stove the fire is outside the stove, so much of that heat (radiation and convection) doesn't heat the fuel, which is usually a feature, not a bug.
So the fuel must be warmed up, or the stove modified to work better in the cold. Suggestions: Perhaps priming it by letting it burn openly at first, or hovering the pot above the fire instead of placing the pot down on top, letting it center burn for a while before placing the pot down and then using the ports. Another suggestion would be placing it in a shallow dish and putting fuel in that dish to ignite first may help. Perhaps a copper strip could be used as some use with a canister stove where part of the strip would go under the can and then bend up through the flame at one port.