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Garden hose for natural gas???

egansen
egansen Member Posts: 31
in THE MAIN WALL
I bought this crucible furnace at a sale this weekend and noticed that the owner had used a garden hose to connect the furnace to the black iron pipe in his shop. There was a smaller oven with the same female coupling on it as well. Yikes! When I install it in my shop it will get plumbed with black iron pipe.
Jean-David Beyer

Comments

  • Jamie Hall
    Jamie Hall Member Posts: 24,878
    What is it that @Steamhead always says?...
    Br. Jamie, osb
    Building superintendent/caretaker, 7200 sq. ft. historic house museum with dependencies in New England
  • JUGHNE
    JUGHNE Member Posts: 11,279
    A 1980's story from the gas company employees; for disconnect of non payment they would remove the meter and the regulator leaving just the stubs out of the ground in the alley.
    Someone wanted to bootleg some free NG. They used rubber radiator hose to connect the two pipe together and light the furnace off. The house boomed and burned.
    The rubber hose was not the real problem but the lack of the pounds to ounces regulator.
    Since that incident the company would leave the regulator in place if they pulled the meter. Never heard if they had any liability in that event...today they probably would.
    Now they install a locking cap over the incoming pressure line.
  • Zman
    Zman Member Posts: 7,611
    Well, it's all perspective.
    For the US that would be extremely dangerous.
    Compared to some countries, heck it's only 1/4 psi :D
    https://gizmodo.com/chinese-villages-use-giant-balloons-to-steal-natural-ga-5889094
    "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"
    Albert Einstein
  • jumper
    jumper Member Posts: 2,385
    I think that in fifties I often saw stoves with what I presume was pieces of hose. And in those days Toronto had sour NG. Did plumbers carry satisfactory tubing that looked like ordinary lawn hose?
  • Intplm.
    Intplm. Member Posts: 2,200
    Zman said:

    Well, it's all perspective.
    For the US that would be extremely dangerous.
    Compared to some countries, heck it's only 1/4 psi :D
    https://gizmodo.com/chinese-villages-use-giant-balloons-to-steal-natural-ga-5889094

    Now that's a gas bag !
  • mattmia2
    mattmia2 Member Posts: 10,955
    Probably not as terrible as you think but not the brightest ideas either.
  • Alan Welch
    Alan Welch Member Posts: 270
    Yeah, they could have used a soaker hose.
    SlamDunkIntplm.Jean-David Beyer
  • nicholas bonham-carter
    nicholas bonham-carter Member Posts: 8,578
    Very funny!—NBC
  • nibs
    nibs Member Posts: 516
    Me dear old dad told me he used to see cars with rubber bladders inflated with coal gas tied onto the roof or in the boot (trunk) of cars, during ww2 in England, gas was not restricted, but you had to have coupons to get petrol. Bet there were some that popped, and one can imagine that garden hoses were handy for fillups.
    Zman
  • HammerHead
    HammerHead Member Posts: 7
    Back in the day I worked on a farm that had free lease gas from the farm wells and we used old garden hoses to run all the gas throughout the greenhouses for the open flame heaters. We had a leak once in a while but nothing ever exploded.
  • GroundUp
    GroundUp Member Posts: 2,124
    If you think about it, they've been using rubber fuel lines in gasoline powered automobiles for decades at higher pressures than NG will ever reach. Most new underground NG is run in PE with stab fittings. This isn't really that crazy.
    mattmia2

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