teflon tape color

Mar 04, 2005 9 Replies

I know yellow is used for gas and white for plumbing. Is there any real difference between the two tapes? Seamus J. Wilson


The yellow stuff is thicker and less likely to have pieces break off to clog orifices.

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White - industrial; Yellow - Gas; Pink - Water; Green - Oxygen; Gray - Steel

Not necessarily. PTFE high-density tapes come in a number of colors, and can be all the same thickness.

I paid a high price for the yellow stuff, for fixing gas lines. This tape is thicker than the white I use for water plumbing.

I have not "googled" this or done any other search. I am thinking that gas plumbing, being subjected to lower pressure than water plumbing, is not tightened as much. Hence the thicker tape. Conversely, one would not want thick tape on threads that must be tightened strongly.

Gas attacks teflon tape, or at least an additive does. The yellow tape is denser and resists the attack.

I have used yellow on water without any problems, just because it happened to be what I found first.

"bumtracks" wrote

What "government standards"? Anybody who cooks on Chinese teflon, or puts his food on those beautifully painted Chinese pottery is trusting his health to "the wind." Then, again, some folks go to drug pushers, the most scrupulous people on earth, and injest, inject, snort, or inhale god-knows-what from god-knows-where. And let's not forget the ubiquitous spam what wants us to ingest sexual potency drugs...or ANYthing at all, from god-knows-who.

The release of chemicals into my gas flame is of no concern to me. The release of chemicals into the food I might eat concerns me.

Normally pink is used to designate a thicker (.004) tape for plumbing use. I didn't know it was also used to designate petroleum use.

Yeah, I've always seen red / pink designated for plumbing. Once you get to thicker and/or denser, I thought the only difference was the type of or lack of lubricant on the surface of the tape (which, AFAIK, is 100% teflon except for the pigmentation). Doesn't seem like it'd really matter for petroleum use...a few ppm of contaminants from the tape lube shouldn't be an issue.

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