Valve ID.

STEVEusaPA

I saw this on a new customer's gas line. The gas line is not connected to anything-all appliances are oil and electric, and no gas meter. The gas line runs out of the house and into the ground toward the street. No meter or shut off valves.
It's a Honeywell valve, has low voltage wires on it that go no where, and it has what appears to be it's own bypass line. All branches have closed shut off valves that go no where.
No evidence of gas fireplace, and pipe dead ends 20' away in the basement.
Looks to be some sort of gas shut off.
Just curious.

unclejohn

Some type of bleed off valve. Flow would be from right to left in picture. Solenoid would open and allow gas from right to lift bellows and valve would open When shut off the gas would bleed off at burner and spring would close bellows.

retiredguy

Most every school building in the city of Pittsburgh, Pa has a manual reset master shutoff valve on the gas line that shuts off all the natural gas supply to the whole building in the event of a fire or other disaster. This valve could have been used as the same thing although I never saw one used in a residence.

STEVEusaPA

Thanks guys for some insight. What do you think the low voltage wires were doing? Wired to a control on a boiler?

retiredguy

I would guess that the wires went to a fire alarm system or to a company responsible for the distribution of the gas.

I still remember the mandatory control systems that were installed on the boiler systems in schools and some buildings east of Harrisburg, Pa. These control systems were installed so that the gas supplier in some cases, when gas supplies were low, could shut off the gas supply forcing those customers to switch to an alternative heat source. Some of these systems were controlled by the customer and in some cases the gas supplier controlled them. Since most larger systems had dual fuel burners, usually nat gas and fuel oil, switching to fuel oil or an alternative heat source was easy. The only problem our customers encountered was that when the gas supply was shut off the alternative fuel for the pilot was for propane that in most cases was a manual event, but that is a story for another day. The burners we sold were mostly Power Flame C's

mattmia2

I have seen lots of chemistry labs from the 60's or so that had a key switch that turned the gas to the whole room on or off, I suspect a similar configuration for those.

Maybe that explains what was going on at Clawson middle school. The building was built in the 20's as the high school. It had what looked like oil fill pipes but given the prices of oil vs gas in the area in the 80's they coudln't possibly have been heating with oil, right? Maybe it was dual fuel. The old part was 2 pipe steam. The new pipe was probably hot water.