Elca Branman on sat 6 apr 02
On Sat, 6 Apr 2002 08:37:42 -0700 Marcia Selsor writes:
> D Maybe those wild men don't have electricity?
> Marcia in Montana
>
Oh , my dear, they do, they do.
Elca
>
>
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James Bowen on sat 6 apr 02
All of this discussion about propane tanks reminded me of
this post that I have saved. From Eddee Chimnakom/Eddie
McGarth/Nikom Chimnok. March 5 2000 Clayart.
"I was happy to read the story below, because it goes to
show that you CAN
heat gas tanks and live to tell about it. In fact you can
heat them again
and again, and live to be a doddering old geezer. It isn't
the safest thing
in the world to do, but you CAN get away with it, especially
if you're smart
and attentive.
I first saw propane tanks being heated in Alaska, where
people start their
cars at 60 below with weed burners. Crankcase oil at this
temperature is
congealed, and batteries have little power, so standard
practice is to keep
a gas tank in the house overnight, then drag it out in the
morning and stick
a weed burner into a length of stovepipe with an elbow that
exits beneath
the oil pan. But if the tank is almost empty, it'll chill
right down till
the fire goes out, so you pull the weed burner out and warm
the tank till
the flame is steady again, then resume heating the oil pan.
This works.
A much safer solution is to have a heated garage, and this
is what
university professors do. Wild young men who live in shacks,
however, do
not. Oddly enough, I never heard of anyone dying this way,
tho numerous
radiator hoses have been burnt.
And now I work at a factory in Thailand, where we fire every
other day a
kiln that uses 6 tanks of gas per firing. Three tanks are
manifolded
together, and they sit in a tank of water with a gas
cookstove beneath,
warming the water. Five years now, and no accidents.
But to get a wider perspective, I interviewed our Number One
Fireman, who
hails from Lampang, a pottery city in Northern Thailand
where there are 200
factories with 10000 workers making slipcast junk for
Hallmark and Walmart
and outfits like that. I asked him if he'd ever heard of an
accident. "Yes,"
he answered, "but all the people got out alive."
He said the problem in Lampang is big big kilns, where
they're heating 10
and 20 tanks at a time: too many to watch. The water gets
too hot, the
pressure gets too high, and the regulator starts leaking;
the gas then is
ignited by the flame underneath the water tank. This is not
too
serious--just turn off the tank supplying the burner under
the tank, and the
fire will soon burn itself out.
The big danger is when somebody forgets to open the valve on
one of the
tanks. The rupture of a full tank of gas is a serious
matter: will take the
roof off and knock the kiln down. If nobody dies it's just
luck.
But for the most part, 99+% of the time, the system works
fine. We have a
rule: watch the pressure gauge. We have two gauges, one
before the regulator
and one after. The one before tells what the tank pressure
is. Since a fresh
tank of gas reads 100 psi, we assume that's safe. When
heating the water, we
turn off the gas supplying the heater at about 90 psi:
margin of safety.
When trading out empty tanks for full ones, we dump hot
water and add cool,
because the full ones could be over-pressurized if the water
is too hot. We
practice preventative maintenance too, in that every year I
go to town and
purchase new rubber gaskets for the connectors where the
hoses screw into
the tanks, whether the old ones need replacing or not.
Of course we check from time to time to make sure there are
no leaks. The
stern safety warning, "IF there is a leak..." has no
meaning. There is
either a leak or there is not a leak, and it's easy to find
that out with a
cigarette lighter (or sudsy water, if you are afraid of
cigarette lighters.)
We fire in a huge open barn of a building, so there's no
possibility of
pooling gas, unlike in tight little rooms. So small leaks
are not a
problem--we don't stop the firing because of one. Fix them
between firings.
Heating water is a lot safer than directly heating the tank,
because the
water is never going to get much above the boiling point,
while playing a
flame on the tank could turn the steel red, if you were
stupid enough.
Please let me say that I have no objection to safer systems,
either--it's
just that none are easily available here. There are no big
tanks for rent.
I've recommended to the management that they buy a tank the
size they have
at the service station where we get our 48 KG tanks filled,
but they reject
this as too expensive. It'd be nice to have liquid burners,
or in-line
evaporators with electric heaters, such as I hear are widely
used in Japan,
but we don't have any of them either, so we get by. And get
by pretty well,
too--no one here has ever been harmed by gas, while scores I
know have died
in traffic accidents, of AIDS, electrical shocks, lung
cancer and cirrhosis
of the liver.
Tho I have lived amongst fatalists for a long time, I have
not become one.
Nor, while heating gas tanks do I feel exactly like a
cowboy. Instead, I
feel more like Werner von Braun, I believe it was, about
whom I once read
this story: In one of the early rocket launches, at about 2
minutes before
IGNITION, somebody noticed a puddle on the ground beneath
the rocket. While
everyone else, assuming a leak of some kind, was yelling
ABORT ABORT ABORT,
Dr. von Braun made a mad dash, ducked beneath the rocket,
stuck his finger
in the puddle, stuck his finger in his mouth, pulled it out
and yelled
"Condensation!", simultaneously giving them a thumbs up. The
launch was on.
I'm no rocket scientist, but I know how to heat a gas tank.
If you're
careless and stupid (ha ha, the careless and stupid are
always the last to
know it!) you shouldn't try it. But if you understand the
basics of gas
behavior, and carefully attend to what you are doing, you
can get away with
heating gas tanks all your life. It's less dangerous than
driving cars,
because you are in complete control, and never need to worry
about drunks
smashing into you."
So much on the subject of heating gas tanks.
Nikom
Marcia Selsor on sat 6 apr 02
Dear James,
Aside from the details of using propane in Asia, I was surprised about the heating
of car engines in Alaska. In Montana we get our cars equped with a heat bolt heat
which will heat the crankcase oil at -50 or -60. I know they do this in Canada
also. Maybe those wild men don't have electricity?
Marcia in Montana
James Bowen wrote:
> All of this discussion about propane tanks reminded me of
> this post that I have saved. From Eddee Chimnakom/Eddie
> McGarth/Nikom Chimnok. March 5 2000 Clayart.
> SNIP
>
> I first saw propane tanks being heated in Alaska, where
> people start their
> cars at 60 below with weed burners. Crankcase oil at this
> temperature is
> congealed, and batteries have little power, so standard
> practice is to keep
> a gas tank in the house overnight, then drag it out in the
> morning and stick
> a weed burner into a length of stovepipe with an elbow that
> exits beneath
> the oil pan. But if the tank is almost empty, it'll chill
> right down till
> the fire goes out, so you pull the weed burner out and warm
> the tank till
> the flame is steady again, then resume heating the oil pan.
> This works.
>
> A much safer solution is to have a heated garage, and this
> is what
> university professors do. Wild young men who live in shacks,
> however, do
> not. Oddly enough, I never heard of anyone dying this way,
> tho numerous
> radiator hoses have been burnt.
HUGE SNIP
Janet Kaiser on sun 7 apr 02
Ahhh... Eddie (alias Nikom) would have been able to tell us for
sure... But from what I recall him telling me from our long "talks",
he really was a "wild man" when he lived in Alaska. Wrote a book on
insulating houses out in the wilds, so that minimal heating was
necessary. I therefore *presume* he had no electricity and even if he
did, he possibly would have scorned any fancy "heat bolt", unless it
could be used for many other jobs, like cooking soup or lighting a
fire! :-) His pioneer spirit would have him making his own with what
little was available.
How I miss Ed. I truly believe he was one of the most interesting and
entertaining voices I have met in cyber space. Such refreshing and
insightful prose and thoughts. And since his death, we have so little
input from an Asian or a (so-called) Third World perspective, written
in depth with first-hand knowledge.
Sadly... Janet Kaiser
The Chapel of Art / Capel Celfyddyd
Home of The International Potters' Path
8 Marine Crescent : Criccieth : GB-Wales
URL: http://www.the-coa.org.uk
postbox@the-coa.org.uk
----- Original Message -----
> Aside from the details of using propane in Asia, I was surprised
about the heating
> of car engines in Alaska. In Montana we get our cars equped with a
heat bolt heat
> which will heat the crankcase oil at -50 or -60. I know they do this
in Canada
> also. Maybe those wild men don't have electricity?
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