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Old 12-08-2010, 02:03 AM   #69 (permalink)
dday
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Jerryrigger View Post
So how about two 10 lb tanks? Link them together at high pressure, and then feed both into the primary reg with a T.
They are right you can run two tanks and this will solve your problem of the tank freezing up on you and shutting down the gen. That is what was happening to you before when it would run for 3 seconds and stop. Propane runs at -44 F So when you pull too much off one bottle it freezes up and you can't get enough propane out of it any more until you let it heat back up. Make sure you run equal length hoses from both bottles to the reg. You can do this with the bbq bottles, just use two. A bigger tank will work also but you wanted to use the bbq tanks, so do it with two of them.

Also the only other thing I was thinking was that if the Gen ran off of liquid and the original regulator was set up for liquid then you may have problems trying to run vapor. On forklifts they use liquid from the bottle and then the regulator has warm water running through it from the engine, to change the liquid to vapor at that point but the warm water keeps the regulator from freezing up.

The big problem with propane is that it expands 250 times when changing from liquid to vapor (correct me if I am wrong here) so that makes it freeze up really easy when you start to pull big volumes of vapor off the bottle.

Cool project by the way.

Last edited by dday; 12-08-2010 at 09:41 AM..
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