Checking gas level in the caravan or motorhome

I really welcome back to a rather overcast day here at the storage yard now today's video I'm going to show you how to check the level of your gas bottle now the methods that I'm going to use in the products I'm going to use work really well for both butane and propane tanks today I'm going to show you the various methods on a six kilo propane tank which is the usual style which you find in a lot of caravans it's one of the older ones which is known as a heavy bottle you can also you get to the light gas bottles now and they have a very handy little gauge on the top to show you how full they are so let's just hop straight into it and first up it's this little fellow it's the butane propane magnetic level indicator so these little chaps are really inexpensive and you can pick them up from anywhere these days I bought this one off of Amazon but you can pick them up from shops dealers online anywhere they're really cheap very affordable and they work like this it's a record a difference in temperature I don't know if you can see that I'm looking at the screen here but if I just hold it you can see that it starts to show a difference between temperature of two points and the point is this when your gas is in your bottle it's compressed and held in a liquid form and this shows the difference in temperature between that liquid and the space above it so let's put it on the gas bottle and I'll show you exactly how it works so the process is really straightforward make sure your gas bottle is nice and clean and then just put the indicator on the side of the bottle there make sure it's got good contact and then we're going to leave that to change color for the next couple of minutes so this is a fairly new bottle and you can see that all the colors are pretty much the same here so we've got on this line here a dark blue this one over here is a sort of dark brown and as the temperature normalizes itself you can see that it's just changing color all the time what does this actually mean well the theory is is that the difference between the liquid and the space above it the difference is between these two is quite a big temperature change and this should be able to tell us there's a couple of theories whether you should move these around to actually pinpoint the level or whether you should just leave it on the side and it will find the level for you I'll be brutally honest with you I've never got on with these things and they've never really told me what how much gas is in the bottle and for a couple of quid I think they're waste of money so I wouldn't bother with that okay so next up it's the trauma level check indicator used on butane and propane it's an expensive bit of kit I bought this one for about 50 pounds I think in the NEC a couple of years ago not cheap link to this is down below but it uses ultrasonic to find the level of the gas bottle let me put on a gas bottle and show you exactly how that works it's very straightforward how we use this one we just literally attach it to the side of the bottle and the indicator will go green or red and give us an indication with the beef as well so again because I know this is a fresh bottle I'm going to start from this level and work my way up and I hope you can see this okay green green red green so Stella most of the level is about here on this gas bottle as you can see it's quite a nice little neat compact little device also comes with an LED as well which you can see there don't know if it's worth 50 quid though okay so if you haven't got fifty pounds to spend on a ultrasonic level check and you haven't got a magnetic a strip with you what can you actually do well possibly my favourite way of checking a gas bottle is to use nothing more than warm water it uses a little bit of physics and it's a little bit time-consuming but nonetheless we can find out the level of our gas fairly accurately in fact just using warm water so let me show you how that works right now so the process is really straightforward all I've got here is I've got some hot water in a thermal mug and all we're going to do is we're going to pour it over the side of the bottle and the idea is is that we actually want to warm up the casket of the gas here they got a cylinder itself we want to warm it up and what will happen as we let it settle down for a couple of minutes you'll notice that some of it will dry off and some of it will stay wet and in some occasions you'll actually get a really crisp line of condensation so what we're going to do is we're going to pour some water over the side of the bottle here and then we'll let it dry off and see where we can find our gas level right we'll let that search astral and we'll see if we can find a line on the bottle all right folks I don't know if you can actually see this we can just about see it here in the flesh so I don't know if it's coming up on the camera but at the bottom of the line of this muck here there seems to be a very faint line there between it being dry and wet now we can prove that that's where I reckon it is I'm going to prove that just by wiping all of this off so it's dry again and we'll use our really expensive and I said it was about the bottom line of there so if we go in just beneath this iego guys I hope that's been useful for you that's three different ways of checking your gas level so which products would I actually recommend well let's start off with this one would I recommend this no not so I've tried using it in different ways some people say and leave it on the side of the bottle use the bottle whilst you're measuring it I've tried it all different ways they're just rubbish so that's going in the bin actually what I recommend this well yes absolutely if you've got fifty quid to spend on one of these things they're absolutely fantastic that the point is this though it's very expensive but you can go and check any bottle you can literally just go around zapping all the bottles and make sure that everything is ok they are ridiculously expensive I think it's too much money but they do work very very well would I recommend the water trick yes it's great if you're caught out and you haven't got any way of checking your gas supply you can use the bit hot water just dribble over and just wait and see you will find it and you will see the level of the gas so you know it's a good way to get out of there but what I would recommend and what I haven't actually got is an in-line gauge which tells you how much gas is in the bottle that's what I would recommend you can get them in line to go in your gas supply so in between your pigtail and your gas bottle or if you've got an older-style van you can actually get regulators with the gauge already built on and as I've already said the new gas light bottles from Cal Agathe they already have a gauge and an indicator to let you know how much gas is in the bottle so that's what I would actually recommend now I've put links to all of these products down below so go and have a look and see which one you fancy I didn't put a link to this though which is the hot water I think you can work out where that is just talking about the hot water make sure you don't do it in your front Locker because everything will get wet and also don't use boiling water because you might burn yourself so use hot water but not boiling and that's all you need to know so from us up here today from this very gray overcast day here in February which is actually freezing cold I'll see you next week take care any questions put them down below and I'll be happy to answer them for you take care now bye

Channel: The Trudgians

Views: 200,069

Keywords: caravan, gas, level check, butane, propane, truma level check, hints, RV, camping

Id: gLQPczOpBhA

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017