How cold will a butane gas bottle (calor 4.5 Kg) work till?
I.e, if it is outside at say -4C, will gas still flow to the appliance?
(Propane seems to be the lpg fuel of choice for gig shower blocks, etc. Is thot because it works at lower temps? Or maybe you get more bang for your buck?)
Butane fails to vapourise around 0 C from memory.
Propane will still vapourise, again from memory, below -30 C.
Most things like heaters, cooking appliances, use vapour.
I believe fork lifts use liquid propane - you may notice the cylinders are usually horizontal. Cylinders in vapour systems - at least the smaller ones- are used vertically so there is a volume for the vapour to collect to be drawn off.
In France, it is common for people to use butane in houses to run kitchen hobs, certainly in semi rural / rural areas. That is why you see so many supermarkets selling refills.
They also sell butane for outdoor use - caravans, motorhomes etc.
In terms of energy output, butane is higher. However, this is offset by the vapourisation issue.
How expensive are butane and propane in cylinders in France compared with here?
My parents have a holiday cottage which has no mains gas supply to the village, and they chose bottled propane (2x 47 kg cylinders) for central heating. It is hideously expensive to run compared with oil. When we lived there for a year, a pair of cylinders only lasted a week or so in winter.
I suppose if one uses oil for central heating and hot water, and only uses bottled gas where oil is not a substitute (eg a gas cooker) then the cost is less.
How expensive are butane and propane in cylinders in France compared with here?
My parents have a holiday cottage which has no mains gas supply to the village, and they chose bottled propane (2x 47 kg cylinders) for central heating. It is hideously expensive to run compared with oil. When we lived there for a year, a pair of cylinders only lasted a week or so in winter.
I suppose if one uses oil for central heating and hot water, and only uses bottled gas where oil is not a substitute (eg a gas cooker) then the cost is less.
No, From memory of caravanning around 60 years ago ,and conversations on Spanish Facebook groups it starts to fail around +4C. Whilst the boiling point is lower the problem is that as the liquid gas vaporises it cools due to the fact it is the higher energy molecules that escape as gas, leaving lower energy molecules in the cylinder, so the temperature is lower. So if the air temp is +4, whilst the butane starts at +4 it cools until it stops working.
It works down to much lower temperatures. I think the "calories per kg" is a little higher for butane, but I may be wrong.
Dave
In this sentence, you can see what makes the butane work at low ambient.
"i've ran my jetboil at 10 degrees I held the canister in my hands to keep it chugging worked pretty well... out of curiosity i set it down and the flame died rapidly"
The heat from his hand, was helping to boil the butane and provide vapour for the job.
As the ambient gets lower and lower, the heat loss from the tank surface, exceeds the heat input from a hand laid onto the cylinder. Sticking a hand on the side of the tank, to maintain a vapour flow, is only going to work at moderately cold temperatures. It wouldn't work in Antarctic winter, to use your hand.
You sometimes see reference to these, in arctic adventure stories.
A lot depends on how quickly you want it. For most practical purposes for a caravan or motorhome cooking/heating the off-gassing diminishes greatly as you near 4°C.
We made the mistake of using butane in our caravan many years ago early in the spring and had to bring the bottle into the van and heat with with a hair dryer (fortunately we had some mains power) to get it to work.
Butane has a higher calorific value and the cylinders are cheaper in terms of £/kg of gas so you do get more “bangs for your buck” but we’ve had issues with newer van appliances running poorly on butane compared to propane so we’ve just ceased buying it.
Tim
Butane becomes difficult, when in temperatures below around 5C. There is no precise temperature, because it's usuability, depends on the internal temperature of the gas. It might be 5C ambient, but making use of the gas, evaporation, cools the contents down, and can cool it below the point of it being able to evaporate. To evaporate the gas, from the liquid state, it need to draw heat from outside the bottle.
So what can happen is you begin using it just fine at 5C, then the pressure simply dives.
Propane, is the stuff to use year round. Notice the frost appearing on the red bottles, when the contents is being used - it shows the liquid level.
The cheapest way to buy gas, is in a bulk delivery, into a fixed tank, from a tanker. Or from a filling station, which supplies gas for gas powered vehicles, to a refillable container such as Gaslow. Last I heard, around 54p per litre.
They used to supply two different setting of pressure for the two gases, but now they have compromised on a pressure between the two. Modern caravan appliances seem to perform just fine on the compromise pressure.
I buy propane year round, for the caravan, so it is guaranteed to work in the cold mornings of early spring and late autumn.
The classic trick is to take a butane cylinder and set it on the steadily diminishing flame of the butane burner.
Or take the big propane torch, blowing out many pounds of propane an hour, and fire it at the cylinder to heat it, with the propane level clearly visible as a layer of water ice on the outside of the bottle.
What could *possibly* go wrong?
Thomas Prufer
Butane boils at 0 °C & propane at minus 42 °C.
They seem to max-out at 11kg cylinders, sounds like daily refill trips compared to weekly dual 47kg cylinders?
Last time we bought a fill up*, the difference on 6kg was probably about £5.
You can get legally refillable cylinders but they tend to be smaller. I think 11 kg is the largest. You refill them at Garages selling LPG for cars. The cylinders aren’t cheap but, if you use a lot of gas, you can recover the cost.
We first encountered French gas cylinders when we used to rent Gites. They usually had cylinders which were about 15kg size, in some cases tucked under the bench. I then bought a Le Cube when we started touring France etc in our Motorhome.
The ‘portable’ cylinders do but you can have a large, fixed tank installed. It is this kind of fixed tank Harry means.
These fixed tanks are more akin to the large oil tanks people have for oil heating systems. You sometimes see them in the country.
The Gaslow type do, as you say, top out at 11kg.
Our MH has a fixed tank which holds 20 litres, 10kg near enough. I topped it up a couple of weeks back at Morrisons 99p / litre.
In France a 13Kg propane or butane cylinder costs about the same as your 6Kg one, probably a bit less if you shop around. However we use it only for cooking (on a boat) so price really isn't much of an issue.
Thank you, your numbers are probably more up to date. It is a while since I bought a refill in France.
As an aside, I am amazed by the availability of cylinders and the number of brands in France.
Oil is pretty near the price of natural gas.
Well down on any electrical prices, but an electric induction cooker is way better than an Aga top!
My Dad remembered having to build a fire under the fuel tanks of diesel lorries in the winter when he was doing his (Italian) national service in the 50s ...
When I first got a diesel car in 1986 I took a sample of the fuel and put it into the freezer for severla days, which was I suppose at -15 to
-20C. It went milky white but still slopped around easily. I assumed that was because flakes of solid were forming within the liquid. So the fuel would flow, but might block filters or pumps. The car mitigated that by having an in-line electric fuel heater before anything critical.
How cold does it have to get before you need to heat the bulk fuel and not the lines? Or was modern DERV different even back in 1986? Shortly after I got that car, filling stations started to advertise that they were selling "winter diesel".
nib
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