Almost blew up my house tonite!!!!!!!

[Rogue Leader]

Me and my Engine company specialize in propane burn off. Lemme tell u one of those little tanks in the right place will blow up your house and the 3 houses around it depending how close they are.

IMO you should have called the fire dept, we have fans to dissipate the fumes, plus if you have a storm drain it will ALLL go down there and still be a problem.

 

[turbojimmy]

The same thing happened to a neighbor over the summer. During our annual block party he brought out a newly filled 20 lb. cylinder. Before too long it was blowing liquid propane out the safety valve. As the guy in the neighborhood recognized as having loud, scary and mostly dangerous things (more than one neighbor has commented on my habit of dumping denatured alcohol into a container under the hood of my car) I was consulted as to what to do with it. I opened it to relieve the pressure but of course it was the new style so it didn't work. I brought it around behind his house in the shade (i.e., far away from me, my family, and anything I care about). After a few hours it stopped leaking but it was scary in the meantime.

Jim

 

[kgouldsk]

I don't think in this case, and many others, that the bottle is necessarily overfilled, if we're defining that as "above 80%". I think it's simply a matter of an excessively wide temperature swing. I witnessed this happening over Christmas - I'd refilled my cousin's bottle so we could barbecue, and it started venting. We heard it as it was in the entry way, so quickly hustled it outside. No harm done.

Incidentally, mercaptan is AMAZINGLY stinky stuff. As the new guy at the pipeline, I had to suit up and wear a gas mask to refill the parasitic bottle that doles it into the pipeline. 42 inch pipe runs for 6 months before we need to refill the dispenser, which holds all of maybe 6 quarts of this scary stuff. Despite the environment suit, I stunk for close to a week.

 

[Buick From Hell]

Hey, we all got gas tanks with bare 12v wires connected to electric fuel pumps that are buried in gasoline! (WHEN the tank is more than 1/2 full!) Which is more dangerous!?

Considering how many propane (or gas tanks!) DON'T blow up, they can't be too dangerous? (odds are you'll probably break your neck in your own bathtub before your propane tank will explode!)

I just think it's kind of stupid to design a tank valve to not allow for overfilling, then at the same time design it to LEAK too...

I've had a regulator valve go bad & leak before, but I've never seen a "safety valve" leak on a propane tank...

 

[Sleeper-6]

I think when submerged in fuel the explosion hazard is gone, as the vapors are the problem not the liquid itself. Below half a tank I'm going to guess that the concentration of O2 in the tank is not enought to support combstion if there were a problem. As stated earlier, the mixture must be between the upper and lower explosive limits (UEL + LEL) to combust

 

[ncgreg231]

Originally posted by kgouldsk
Compressed gases even in small quantity are unbelievably dangerous. I used to work on a natural gas pipeline and the guys there had all kinds of stories. I even witnessed some pretty dramatic demonstrations myself.

A friend sent this to me a while back:

http://kgouldsk.dynu.com/oxy.ppt

It's a powerpoint presentation - if it doesn't load, you may need a viewer. This should do it for you:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/OfficeXPProf/Install/4.71.30.1/W98NT42KMe/EN-US/PPVIEW97.EXE

woah......