Propane or Butane

In practice, it's pretty rubbish well above that as any significant off-gassing cools the liquid below ambient and dramatically reduces output.

Tim

YUup, as most of the cooling is due to the gas boiling off. One cold day, in a mountain hut in N. Wales, I was using a twin-burner stove with the butane cylinder on one of the burners. There was much alarm due to this until I pointed out that the condensation on the cylinder was a good indicator of some way to go before the big bang!

BTW, what about the propane/butane azeotropic mixture that I've seen around? ICR the colour of the cylinder, but it seemed to be a possible solution.

bert used his keyboard to write :

Which is easy to solve - I solved it by simply raising the height of the bulkhead regulator, so the heavy ends are forced to drain back to the tank.

Sorry, I meant +10 C - and ambient of +10 C. At +10 C the in use cylinder can rapidely be cooled by gas evaporation to below the -1 gassing temperature.

On that one I agree .. but not on the others ...

In fact on this one form a BBQ manufacturer ... it is even more confusing

It states modern BBQ should be run on propane .... they will run on butane but not efficiently.

Yet in their picture they show Butane !!

agree used a caravan once and at -3 not gas for heating or cooking at all ... very cold.

Oops. Okay, not 20% and not the same price but the balance is still in favour of butane (cost-wise).

Tim

Strange that manufacturers are now supplying Propane regs as standard and recommending propane as the most efficient - although admittedly they do say will also work on butane.

Both Outbackand Fire Mountain (2 big names) give that advice.

Probably because they don't want complaints from customers of the heat output dropping during use in colder weather. Easier to just say "use propane" and then they don't get any aggro from folk who don't understand physics.

Tim