With the cost of gas edging up, I found myself wondering about the practicalities and issues around buying/renting a couple of 47Kg propane cylinders with changeover valve and using that as my gas feed.
I know burners all need to be tweaked, but I think all appliances can be run from propane ?
Have you checked the price of LPG relative to mains gas, allowing for different calorific values?
What is your gas usage?
Friends in a rural location with no mains gas had central heating fitted. The cheapest quote for fitting the system was with the use of propane cylinders (no tank for fuel required). The downside was it would have been the most costly to run requiring approx 20 cylinders per year and possibly having 4 on tap mid-winter to cope with high demand over an extended Christmas and new year holiday or snow/icy period where deliveries may have been delayed.
Mains gas would have been the cheapest installation and running cost but not an option.
Firstly, I think it most unlikely that liquified gas will ever work out cheaper than mains gas.
Secondly, I suspect that pipework for LPG has to meet different standards as LPG is heavier than air and NO leak is acceptable (unlike mains gas where a pressure drop below a certain level is deemed acceptable. In short, it could be dangerous to put LPG through your existing pipework.
Tim
47 kg propane cylinders are a *very* expensive way to heat a house compared with oil or piped natural gas. Very much a *last* resort.
My parents have a holiday cottage in a village that has no gas supply. Everyone else uses oil but my parents had a bottled-gas boiler installed - and it costs the earth to run. When that boiler broke, they had another one installed, rather than switching to oil.
We lived there for a year between selling our old house and finding a new house, and the cost to heat that cottage was astronomical.
Many thanks all for some great points.
You can however, get more Kw through a smaller size of pipe, because it has a higher calorific value.
Back of envelope calculation :)
The average household gas consumption in the UK seems to be 12,000kWh/annum.
A 47kg cylinder of propane is equivalent 650kWh @ around £70 per refill
(12,000/650) * £70 = £1,292
Yes our cottage pipework is small-bore which means that it is flexible enough to have elbows bent in it without the need for a pipe-bending spring.
I was expecting that the extra carbon atoms going from methane (natural gas) to propane, and from that to butane, would give progressively more MJ/kg but it's remarkably similar:
methane 55.5 MJ/kg propane 50 MJ/kg butane 49.5 MJ/kg
I wonder why methane (readily available from natural gas) isn't supplied in bottled form. Maybe it's more dangerous because it remains a gas at room temperature even at the pressure in a cylinder, whereas propane and butane are liquid in the cylinder (you can hear them sloshing around if you tilt a cylinder). The big advantage with propane over butane is that it boils off to a gas at the sort of pressures that are fed to an appliance, even at cold ambient temperature, so there is not the risk in cold weather of liquid propane finding its way into the pipes and hence to the burners, unlike for butane in very cold weather.
More impressive difference if you compare volumetrically instead of gravimetrically :-)
natural gas 38.7 MJ/m^3 LPG 93.2 MJ/m^3
Well, it would be. Carbon atoms are 13 or so times as heavy as hydrogen so are the main source of the weight of the substance.
It would be very odd if other forms of gas did not go up as well though. Brian
Like all the "green electricity" idiots:
Energy bills: ?I got a green deal, so why am I paying eye-watering sums??
Daft.
It's actually not a stupid question. Turns out that the market assumes all generation is priced at the cost of gas, even if renewables are a lot cheaper. That means that, even though only 40% of our electricity comes from gas, the electricity market prices in 100% of the fluctuation in the gas price:
Even if renewables are a lot cheaper, they still have to *produce*, which they seem to be unable to do quite often. Just now, gas is producing 50% of our volts, nuclear 13%, and wind just a smidge above nuclear. Solar producing zero as you'd expect on an overcast winter's day.
That cold week in early-mid-December, wind produced next to nothing. Solar got up a bit, because it was sunny, but only for 3 hours a day or so.
But how are those on green tariffs getting their green energy when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.
Isn't wind only cheaper when it produces excesses in the summer months or overnight when the wind does blow and demand is reduced?
And how much would renewables be if they weren't subsidised? And how much would they be if they had to pay for the cost of providing backup for WTWDBATSDS?
See also
Yes, but the price of production itself has not gone up. It doesn't cost much more to operate a CCGT this year then it did two years ago (modulo general inflation, labour costs, etc). What has gone up is the price of
*fuel*.But every kWh you get out of nuclear, hydro, wind or solar is a kWh you aren't buying of gas. So the question is: why are the price rises coupled to 100% of the price of gas when only 40% of the kWh are actually derived from gas?
Obviously we need to pay for the gas plant to be there at times of low renewable generation, but we were paying for the gas plant to be there two years ago at a much lower tariff and they weren't making a loss then. There's no reason why their costs (apart from fuel) should suddenly jump. And that means we should be seeing the increase tracking 40% of the price of gas to mirror what we actually burn, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
Theo
Well they aren't. Without gas you would be seeing 40p a unit from renewables
What you are seeing is the true cost of renewable energy when its not being subsidised by cheap gas coal and nuclear.
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