It all varies. We bought a cabin. One insurance company said the propane tank cannot be within 50' of the structure. Others said nothing. It might be a building department regulation. An insurance company requirement.
Check your local regs. It don't matter what they do in Kansas.
Steve
(hope you are not in Kansas ...............)
Next door neighbor (previous owner) had propane stove and had the tanks (tall slender type) right next to the house. Newer neighbors across the street - propane company put their large tank about 40 feet from their mobile home. My tank was there when I bought the place - large type - about
20 feet from the house.Must vary by state - or possibly even within the state - by location. Check with the pros - if you have anything other than the small tanks you bring in yourself - they will probably have to install it anyway.
Jan
Learn something new every day As long as you are learning, you are living When you stop learning, you start dying
What are the rules about propane tank location (distance from the house, etc). Are these national rules or do they vary with individual states?
There are plenty of national and regional propane trade organizations and companies web sites that spell out a lot of information. Best to rely on a pro rather than a bunch of newsgroup addicts on that. Your local dealer will know the regs.
Iirc, the 3' thing has to do with fueling the tank; same holds for the outside fueling point for an oil tank in the basement. As for propane tanks, some places there is a regulation that prohibits "hiding" it with a fence, shrubs, etc.
Depends on the tank size also. I have two large (100 pound?) cylinders right next to my house but they are not allowed to be within 3' of a door or window. Larger tanks must be away from the house, but I don't know the size or the distance. and it may vary by location.
Hey you need to heed EP's and other's advice and get the local pro's to tell you. In addition to distance, some codes restrict orientation that is the direction of the center axis. Something about if a head were to blow off.
Frank
it's local codes. ask the guy who's going to install it. in my area, my 500 gal tank is about 30' from the garage wall buried about 6' down so that only the cap is above ground.
regards, charlie cave creek, az
why don't more places allow burying the tanks? it shouldn't get very hot in that case, and who wants to look at a propane tank anyway?
wouldn't you smell it?
The joke in southern Louisiana for the local volunteer fire department was, "They always get there in time to save the foundation and fireplace."
Steve
In misc.rural Jonathan Grobe wrote: : What are the rules about propane tank location : (distance from the house, etc). Are these national : rules or do they vary with individual states?
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Ayup. I've seen video of a propane tank doing the BLEVE (boiling liquid, expanding vapor explosion) trick, and it's impressive... and something to avoid being near...
Dave Hinz
We got lucky and avoided at least *THAT* particular problem when the house burned down a couple years ago. Fire guys were *REAL* interested in knowing where the (recently topped off in preparation for the oncoming winter) 300+ gallon propane tank was when they first got here, and once located, kept a hose on it for the duration. Stuff further from the house than the tank was bursting into flames with no visible source of ignition just because of the radiant heat from the fire - most of the fire-crew effort went to keeping the surrounding vegetation and such from catching - The house was already a total write-off 20 minutes or more before they actually managed to arrive. (Absolutely no intent to slam the FD for poor response time should be imagined - I have a very firm grasp on the reality that it's a 30 minute drive from here to the nearest fire station when I "leadfoot" it in my little semi-sports car - "Only" 45 minutes from the call to 911 to seeing a "ready-for-action" firetruck pull onto the property is doing *EXTREMELY* well indeed.)
The two portable propane tanks hooked up under the grill that was sitting on the deck vented with a roar like a pissed off dragon, backed with what I'd estimate to be a 30+ foot long tounge of flame, but fortunately they didn't BLEVE, or I imagine we'd have lost the other two vehicles and probably a couple of the horses along with everything else that burned in the house.
Yep. There's a vent on the top (round pipe looking thing a few inches high) that is _supposed to_ open when the tank pressure is high. We had a fire where that was venting, and near the fire, of course it was a hella-big torch. That was fine, really, we didn't mind. Kept a hose on the tank, so the surface stayed wet (below boiling point of water on the outside = not too hot on the inside). We weren't nervous until the venting stopped, because there's no way to know if it was just empty (it was), or if the vent had melted shut or something. There was some pucker-factor at that one.
Been there, done that. Don't like it. One of our house fires started in an unattended house on a day with 40 MPH winds. Can you say "blowtorch"? The only thing we could do, as you say, was protect the exposures.
Whic means 45 minutes by tanker, or more. Those things drive like, well, like things that are really big, slow, and filled with water.
Long time when you're on the calling end of the phone, though.
Saved the horses? Fantastic. That was another fire recently, at a horse barn. The kind of place where people board their horses, maybe 40 or 50 of 'em. Not a good ride to that fire, let me tell you. But, they all got out. Barn was a total loss, and housing was a bit tight in the county for a bit, but there ya go.
Well, how would you know when it's rusted/leaking then?
Gawd, *THAT* had to be a nightmare...
Hmmm... Yeah, I guess that would be an accurate description :)
Believe me... I know from experience *EXACTLY* how long a time it is when you're the one on the calling end - Without going into the math involved to get a multi-digits-to-the-right-of-the-decimal number, "For-freakin'-EVER!" is a perfectly reasonable approximation :)
The only way the horses were ever in danger was if the surroundings caught, or something "turned violent" (exploding propane tanks, ammo, etc) in the fire. Otherwise, they were far enough away that they were all safe. When the ammo started cooking off, the closet that it was stored in had already fallen into the basement, so that was pretty much a non-issue. Amazingly enough, the largest hazard (aside from the fire itself) was the exploding canned goods - You'd hear a weird KER-THWUMP!, and next thing you knew, there was this jagged hunk of metal bouncing past you at high speed! Two years later, I'm *STILL* finding tin-can shrapnel scattered around the property.
As a lifelong horseman (frequently bunking in quarters attached to/part of the barn), I know all about the terror of barn fires. Throw the doors open, prod the stock with anything that will spook them out and keep them there, be it a rope, a shovel, or a pitchfork, and then hope like hell you can close things up and/or guard the approaches well enough to keep them from running back in to what they consider a place of safety. And then cry for the ones you couldn't get/keep out.
That's good to hear, at least!
I'd *MUCH* rather be scrounging for a chunk of fenced land to park 'em on for a while than burying them...
Methinks that qualifies as what they call "gallows humor", no? :)
Basically, that's when the FD got here for ours - But as I said, I can't blame them. They had 20 miles to travel, with most of the last 4 being steep uphills, and the last 2 of that switchback gravel. I do the trip in my wannabe-sports-car in about half an hour when I drive with a heavy foot and no traffic. I am, to be perfectly honest, quite impressed that the first truck was able to get here in "only" 45 minutes. An hour or longer for first ground-based response wouldn't have surprised me even a little bit.
Air response, on the other hand, was fairly quick, since we've got the tanker base about 8 minutes away by air. CDF Air-attack was circling overhead about 15-20 minutes after the initial call, with chatter on the scanner telling me that they had a borate bomber in the air and orbiting the tanker base, two more on the strip with engines hot and waiting for the "go" with an ETA of 10 minutes, the crew for a fourth prepping, a dozer crew on standby, plus two choppers with dip-buckets (Big advantage: the lake that more-or-less surrounds us is mighty conveniently located for firefighting purposes if you've got aircraft that can dip out of it) en-route from Grass Valley with an ETA of 12 minutes - Since the area is definite "wilderness interface", they went full response right from jump in an effort to keep it from getting off the property. Thankfully, it worked. Before all was said and done, over
15 ground units and 8 aircraft, plus I-don't-even-know-how-many bodies got involved in stomping this one out.Unfortunately, keeping it from turning into a full-scale California wildfire was the only thing they had any prayer of doing by the time they were able to get bodies on-scene. The house was pretty much "It's only still standing 'cause the wind hasn't blown hard enough to knock the last of it over yet" when the first truck rolled up the driveway, with some of the closer trees starting to catch. They put the hose on the propane tank, and went to work knocking out the trees that were burning, and didn't turn their attention to the house proper until the second and third trucks rolled in. By then, most of the house had fallen into the foundation, turning the whole mess into a pretty good rendition of the ultimate barbecue pit - Trying to get any closer than about 50 feet was a good way to remove any facial hair you might have been wearing...
Many jurisdictions allow buired tanks. They have a special coating to reduce corrosion and have anodes on the to corode first. Over 50% of all new tank installations in the US are now buired. See the web sites for tank manufacturers such as American Tank or Trinity.
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