Around here, nothing but a yellow flex poly tubing is acceptable. Has to be the right plastic so gas will not weep through and has to be yellow or orange so people will reconize it when they find it accidently. Uses special conectors with glads to prevent leaks. Years ago, I used black poly tubing and every time my property flooded, I could fine the location of the buried gas line from the tiny bubbles in the floodwater.
Find a local propane supplier in your Yellow Pages. They routinely bury flexible tubing in trenches from the tank to the buildings, and you could probably just buy the tubing and end fittings from them.
The code for buried lines is different, so you can't just use above-ground products. Where I live, poly flex pipe is typically used in a trench 24" deep with a copper tracer wire attached so it can be located later on. An alternative (if code allows) is the coated iron pipe, or tin lined copper tubing. These are metal, so no tracer wire is needed, but they can have corrosion problems in certain soils.
Plumbing supply houses should have the pipe and fittings and some won't even balk at a DIY if you don't seem too dumb. But be aware that the gas company might cut you off if they find any hack work attaching your line to their meter.
Since you mentioned a foundry furnace, please consider the capacity of your existing meter before you add on any more appliances. Look at the tag on the front of the meter and it will list the cu.ft./hour rating. Multiply that by 1000, and that's about how many BTU you can get through the regulator in the meter. If the meter maxes out at 175000 BTU, and your house needs 100K BTU for the water heater and furnace, you aren't going to have any pressure to run a million BTU foundry furnace in the garage.
My advice is for you to dig the ditch and hire a licensed heating contractor to size and lay the gas line. That will save you some money and it will keep the gas company happy.
They might do that at your house, but not here! It is semi-solid high pressure to a regulator. The Regulator sits on a Yellow coated black iron pipe. That pipe connects to the house black iron pipe.
The Flexible is used from iron pipe to Hot water heater. Only the coated ones.
That is standard code.
If you go to the Lumber or Building Yard and ask them - they will show you the pipe.
Talk to a plumber or the Gas people - they don't lay lines the plumbers do. Gas types attach their tank to the plumbers lines.
Gunner "To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated." - Trefor Thomas
Been there, and have taken the SoCal Gas Appliance Clinic classes...
You need to use the special poly pipe made for buried Natural Gas service, with the swaged on steel "yard ell" fittings where it comes above ground - if you measure the route you may be able to get one pre-assembled, just drop it in the trench and backfill. (Have seen it done that way for pool heaters.)
That, or the green ScotchKote plastic coated Black Steel pipe, and tape all the splices and ends with the thick 20-mil corrosion protection tape.
Either way the line needs to be sized very large, because your natural gas to the house is less than 1 PSI and flow restriction is a big problem. Look up the BTUH flow you need in the garage for the footage of pipe (and each elbow in the line adds another 5' to 10' of resistance IIRC) and then go the next size (or two) larger. Pipe is cheap, the labor to redo it again later is expensive.
Don't tap into the existing gas lines under the house, that will put too much flow through them. Take the new line all the way back to the gas meter so you can have a separate shutoff valve there, and then connect the 1" line to the house and the 1-1/2" line to the garage into one 2" manifold for the meter.
Call the Gas Company when you finish, they will probably need to install a larger gas meter to provide enough flow.
Big copper line covers the distance from the house to the propane tank. The propane company put it 12" deep. I've also got copper running across the basement ceiling to extend the line from the furnace to the fireplace upstairs for the gas logs.
Had NG plumbed into the garage 6 years ago,nice having a warm garage to work in! Do yourself a big,big favour. Dig a decent trench and lay in 4" conduit or weeping tile FIRST ! Then pull the approved gas line(yellow palstic up here) through. While your at it pull some Bell quad,2 or 3 circuits.Good for phone and alarm circuits. Where the plastic terminates inside, transition to black iron pipe. Put a Tee here,for future expansion to the gas BBQ and put extras Tees next to the furnace and the final termination. Again for 'future' uses. You will need them...glad I did it.
Oh yeah, when you backfill the trench,lots of gravell first, then a layer of
1x6 PT fence boards then dirt.Boards will warn you when you dig in that area.
On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:43:01 GMT, Gunner calmly ranted:
See what endless bounds of joy that reading various books can bring? I'd heard the phrase "doom on you" before but never knew what it meant until I read "Rogue Warrior", then I was in tears from laughing so hard.
Over on the Wreck, the "ah" replaces the "o" for a Boston accent. Bahstahn. Bahstahd. I hadn't even considered taht it might translate into Viet.
Darn, I don't speak Vietnamese. Translation, please? Google translates the Viet or Thai pages from simplified Chinese into Chinese with half the text as question marks. Real good, folks. Never mind. I found
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Tahm doesn't translate.)
-- Sex is Evil, Evil is Sin, Sin is Forgiven. Gee, ain't religion GREAT?
Tham (minus the punctuation marks...) means greedy or avaricious
ret tien or khinh ai means roughly..frugal and wise with his money...or a cheap skate depending on slang
We would have to download an additonal charector set to display the punctuations...
Working in Viet machine shops all week has some advantages, once I got over the hair rising on the back of my neck issues for the first year or so.
Tommy...he Numba One Giiii!!
btw...one of the better online dictionaries for Vietnamese is
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I have to use it occasionally when my pocket guide fails me, as my book is a little light on technical terms. Fortunately. most of my little people speak pretty good english, though the accents can be a bit tricky to understand. Particularly if its the end of the day and they are playing cards and drinking Ba mi Ba beer.
Its been said repeatedly with great accuracy, that a group of happy Viets sounds just like a flock of ducs....er...ducks...
One other thing about the viet shops...there are usually ashtrays on each machine. Non of that anti-smoking California crap in thos shops..."555" or Marlbourgh cigarettes are the preference. And fancied up Honda Civics in the parking lot....
Gunner
"To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated." - Trefor Thomas
On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 19:46:21 GMT, Gunner calmly ranted:
Yeah, I thought you might have a good Viet vocabulary working in HelL.A. machine shops. Was the hair raised from memories of fighting in Vietnam 30 years ago, abut the time I escaped it by the hair of my chinny chin chin? (Moved from Phoenix back to Vista just after turning 18 and drew a draft lottery number of 53. Luckily, the San Diego draft board didn't need any more bodies. Whew!)
Yeah, I'm just giving him some ribbing^H^H^H^H^H^H^hchit for the bamboo/sap comment.
I used to work with a Viet gal (electronics test techs, both) at Palomar Technology back in the late 80s. She was a lot of fun and could make fun of her own accent. Every once in awhile, she'd ask us guys if we wanted any penis. When our eyebrows went up, she laughed and repronounced it "Pea Nuss". And we all went over with our hands out for a handful of peanuts. Another of her favorites was "I speak very English." I still laugh when I think about that one. Lien (Lyn) was a great little lady.
Did you ever eat at that L.A. restaurant, the Phat Phuc?
I can't -believe- all the money that's tossed into those little rice burners. Amazing, to say the least.
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