Tips for Propane Safety on a Camper

Liquid petroleum, or propane, or LP is the fuel that you're gonna use to do your stove, do your refrigerator in many cases, furnace inside. So it's very important to understand the characteristics of propane and make sure that you practice some safety precautions with it. Now, the travel trailers like this pop up here will have what's called a propane cylinder, and that's just the tank up in the front, but they call it a cylinder, and it comes in 20 pounds to 40 pounds. In some of the fifth wheels, you can get an 80 pound if you're permanently mounted, which is a massive thing up here, but you have a connection on the front very similar to what you would have at a residential grill. And the first thing that I tell everybody is you wanna make sure that you understand properly filling the propane tanks or cylinders. Now motor homes are gonna have what's called an ASME tank. It's permanently mounted to the side of the frame rail. You cannot take it off to a propane filling station. So these you can take off. What I recommend is that if you're going to take this off to a place that fills it, the first thing you wanna do is get some type of a container in the back of your truck or your SUV. I use a milk crate and it's strapped down so it fits in there perfect. And then I can bungee cord that in. So I know it's not rolling around. So when you do take it to a filling station, whether it's a hardware store that has a filling or the Flying Js, all those have to be certified before they can fill your RV. They're gonna inspect the tank. They're gonna look for the tear weight of it. They're gonna look for any defects in it. The tanks have to be recertified, or excuse me, the cylinders have to be recertified after a certain number of years. And it has changed a little bit. It used to be 10, 12, but your certified filling station will know that know what to look for. Usually you don't recertify 'em. It costs more to do that than just to replace the tank or the cylinder itself. Now motor homes do not fall into that category. So they just look and inspect those. So those will be certified. Everybody needs to be out of the rig when you're filling inside. You have to have everything off inside. So your refrigerators, furnaces, water heaters, all that stuff. You gotta make sure there's no pilot lights, nobody is inside of it. Now this, of course, you're gonna take this off to it. So that's not as important in a popup or a travel trailer. The next thing is, is traveling with propane. And I get this a lot. The reason people travel with the propane on is they want the refrigerator to stay cold. And the thing that I always look at is you've got propane lines running right, coming off the regulator here. You've got propane lines inside that are soft copper. Heaven forbid you ever side swipe a sign or road construction or something, but it's fairly easy for those lines to get pierce if you do something like that. Or all the connections you have on the inside. You could have a leak. And then all of a sudden, you've got this refrigerator that's trying to spark and light. It's a hazard. If you do travel with propane, it's not illegal. There's so many vehicles now that are actually powered by propane, buses and so forth. There are some bridges, there are some tunnels, areas that you can't go into, but if you do travel with propane, make sure that you shut everything off before you go into a fueling station. That's something that a lot of people don't think about is when I go in there, I have to have that flame off of that refrigerator. Now we did some tests. I personally like to shut the tanks or the cylinders off. And we did a couple tests where we brought a refrigerator down to 36 degrees operating temperature, had a temperature sensor inside, shut the door. And six hours later, it was still under 40 degrees. It will maintain cold for a long time. And that's with nothing inside being cooled. The ambient temperature was 98 degrees inside the rig. So you can travel with the propane off and the refrigerator shut and still keep it cool. But again, if you do, you gotta shut that stuff off. Now, a couple little tips. When you're opening the propane valve for the first time in this, do it very slowly. There's a product or a safety feature on here, and this is called an excess flow valve. This is the piece that you have normally to hook onto our tank up here. And inside this is a spring loaded valve. And what this does is that if you get excess flow coming through this, like you have a connection that starts to leak or whatever, this will spring load and shut that off. So you don't fill the inside with it. It does take about 10 minutes or more for it to back pressure in. So we see this a lot in fifth wheels where they have an outside grill. They go in and they open up that LP tank. And then they go in, all of a sudden, the grill won't work. And they go back and shut it off and they try to open up and they can't figure out they've actually tripped this. Now there's a new product out in the market called GasStop. And I met the owner of this company. They're from overseas. They're just getting into the market today. And it is a complete shutoff if you have a gas leak inside of it. So it's a new product. You might want to take a look at something like that if you're traveling on the road with your propane on. Also on the top of all your propane, you have what's called an OPD, or an overflow protection device, which will only allow you to fill that tank to 80%. And the reason is, is propane is gonna expand. With the temperature changes and so forth, it will expand. So you don't wanna fill it more than 80% just to give yourself that safety feature on the top of it. By RVIA code, all RVs have a propane leak detector inside. And what that is is just a small little monitor. And when the propane, whatever chemical composition of it, it senses that towards the bottom, 'cause propane is going to settle. That it will sense that, and it will start to beep to let you know that there is propane in there. Now, one of the things that is a characteristic of that is if your battery level starts to go down and gets below 10.5 volts, I believe it is, it will start beeping as well. So keep that in mind that that could be an issue. Another good tool to have is this right here. If you do smell, the distinctive odor of propane is rotten egg smell. Now propane itself actually has no odor whatsoever, but they've added this chemical composition to it to give it that rotten egg smell. So if you smell something like that and your LP leak detector's not going off on the inside, this is a good tool to have. You simply bring this out, push the button here, and you can see, it'll start to beep. And it kind of goes through a series of tests. It's got a little sensor on the front side of this. And if you do have a propane leak, it'll go to red and give you that warning. Otherwise, it's just gonna go to a straight green here in just a second. And that's shows we don't have a propane leak. Another thing, a lot of people say, well, I'm gonna check my connections. I'm gonna check the stove and that kind of thing. And it's a good idea to do that every once in a while, just do a quick leak test around those just to make sure that valve has not loosened up or anything. Do not use soap and water. The soapy water will actually corrode the gasket and the metal that's in there. They do make a leak testing compound that you can use, but this is a lot easier to do that. And so the last thing I wanna talk about is when you start DIYing your RV. I got people that wanna upgrade. They wanna put a three burner range in instead of what they have. They wanna put a residential refrigerator in instead of the absorption refrigerator. Water heater upgrades, or even if I'm just repairing something. Anytime you start working with propane, make sure you understand how to shut the system off, how to cap the lines inside there. And make sure you feel comfortable working on that. Not everybody can get in and just take a propane line off and put it back on successfully without a little bit of experience and a little bit of technical information for it. We've done a lot of upgrades and a lot of troubleshooting in these RVs and taken stuff apart, but we've always made sure that I brought in an RVIA certified master mechanic, and Steve has over 30 years of it. We took a refrigerator out and put a new one in. Cap the line. Even if you're going to put a refrigerator back in that has a propane system in it, don't leave that line open. Cap that line. Make sure you have no leaks coming in there, 'cause it's real easy to forget. And it's real easy to have somebody come in and just, oh, hey, we'll turn this on. Make sure that you take that step, take the safety, and cap the line so that nothing happens. So again, propane is a great fuel to use for the furnace, for the stove top, some of your refrigerators, but understanding the safety aspects of it and just being careful is very important.