That was a strange experience… Last night I called the fire department after discovering a slow leak from the backyard propane grill. I’d cleaned it earlier in the day, scrubbing off accumulated grease spatters, and in doing so apparently managed to turn one of the burners slightly to “on.”
Later I smelled an odor that I thought was a dead animal. Looked around under the shrubbery to see if Ratty might have croaked over someplace in the yard (some people put out rat poison, which you’d like your dogs not to eat when the victim comes crawling into your yard to die…). Nothing. But by the time the dogs went out for their final patrolling of the yard, around 9 p.m., the odor was clearly propane.
So I called the firemen. The dispatcher wasn’t sure it was necessary to send anyone. He said propane is lighter than air and quickly dissipates.
That was not my understanding. Years ago, I read a Consumer Reports article that said propane is heavier than air, that it can linger for quite a while and will collect in low-lying areas, and that if you live uphill from a neighbor, your leaking propane can flow downhill and accumulate at the neighbor’s place — and explosions have occurred in which a neighbor’s leaking propane drifted downhill and blew up in someone else’s property.
The air was still. No breeze at all was moving. And when I went back into the house from the front patio to get the dogs’ leashes, I could smell propane inside the house, especially in the kitchen.
When I mentioned that the interior smelled of propane, the guy decided to send a crew.
They looked around, turned off and disconnected the tank, and loved up the frantically affectionate corgis. They repeated what their dispatcher had said: that propane is lighter than air. Then they went away.
Huh. Propane is lighter than air, eh?
No.
It’s.
Not.
Some training these guys have had, somewhere, has misinformed them. I wonder what else they’ve been told that’s not true?
Yet another way our education system has failed. I immediately thought of chemistry class and how we’d have been laughed out of the room if we hadn’t tested the notion that “X is lighter than Y” with some logic and scientific facts.
LOL! Yeah, this is Arizona: you can tell when people have graduated from our K-12 system.
Natural gas is lighter than air. Propane is heavier. Long, potentially tragic story behind how I came to know that, but no one was injured in that piece of my education by hard knocks. I did find out during the incident that in most people’s minds propane = natural gas. You would think fire fighters would know better.
Yipe! That sounds scary… Glad to hear no one was hurt.
I’ll bet the confusion comes with the odorant: the stuff they put in to let you know these naturally odorless gasses are present smells the same.
I hate gas because of it’s volatile nature. In addition, in this neck of the woods, every once in a while there is a rash of CO2 poisonings from hot water heaters and furnaces. Especially in Winter. IMHO they are every LL’s nightmare. AND for the firemen to say propane is not “heavier” than air is just crazy…these guys are going to get somebody hurt…..
I thought it was a little scary. Mentioned it to my friend who’s married to a recently retired fireman. She didn’t think it would be politick to pass that little gem along to someone in the FD who might be able to correct it. Ohhhhh well.
You now can get a carbon monoxide alarm/smoke alarm in a single unit, and it’s battery-run. One of the problems with the regular carbon monoxide alarms is that they take up an electrical outlet, which can be quite an inconvenience. I now have a smoke/CO detector right outside the bedroom door. Turns out it’s not true that CO detectors have to be installed near the floor: CO is lighter than air (https://nest.com/support/article/Shouldn-t-a-carbon-monoxide-CO-alarm-be-installed-near-the-floor).
I really dislike electric stovetops. Gas is SO much better for cooking! Of course, since fewer and fewer Americans cook, that’s probably moot now. But it is worth knowing that, at random, an electric stove element can explode and shower the kitchen with molten and red-hot metal (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080427214043AAIBopm). Had it happen inside a wall oven; the repairman who installed the new oven clued me to this lovely, fairly common characteristic of electric stovetops.