"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Propane Is No Fun At All

I went back to Osoyoos yesterday afternoon and finally got the proper hose. I returned home, installed it, checked for leaks, then followed the instructions before trying to light my stove. It got a bit of gas, lit, then conked on. I tried this a couple of times, then went back out. My neighbour saw me poking around and asked me if I needed help. I walked him through the steps I had taken and he confirmed that I did everything perfectly. He said that there was probably a lot of air in the hose and to try to light the stove every couple of minutes until the flame took.

A couple of hours later, he came to see if my stove was firing up. Nope. So, he told me to close the valve on the auxiliary tank, turn on the stove to drain the last of the propane from the hose, and then open the tank sloooooowly so as to trick the flow-limiting valve.

That didn't help either.

But the flow-limiting valve was something I didn't know about. It's a safety feature that prevents a huge amount of propane from getting into your systems and becoming a fire hazard. I Googled that last night and found a suggestion that I simply shut off everything, remove the hose, reattach it, then reopen the tank valve sloooooooowly.

I did that and, this morning, I had a lot more propane coming to the stove, but it still wouldn't stay lit. Same thing this afternoon.

I decided to try to reset the system one last time before admitting defeat and conceding that I might have seriously screwed up my propane system. I closed the valve on the tank, unhooked the hose, rehooked, then just nudged the valve. For the first time, I hear a bit of a hiss. I waited until the noise stopped, then I slowly and evenly opened the valve the rest of the way. I could finally hear propane flowing!

My stove lit up fine and stayed lit for a couple of minutes, so the next step was the hot water heater. It fired up in one try. Woohoo!

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