We’ve had a fairly extended cool spell, with night temps at least dipping briefly into the teens and sometimes substantially colder than that for eleven straight nights. Very far from record cold, but cold enough that I can stop saying, “yeah, but wait till it gets cold.” I swapped out the bedroom heater’s propane bottle on 12/7 and determined that this time, since I’m so bad at estimating how empty a bottle is by weight, I’d resist the temptation to swap bottles before the one in service sucked dry. And it finally did last night, sometime in the wee hours of 12/17.
Uncle Murphy having gone off on a well-earned vacation, it couldn’t have happened on a better night. Clouds and cool wind blew in yesterday afternoon and the clouds stayed overnight, so it never got cold at all. I noticed on rising that the bedroom seemed a bit cooler than usual but really didn’t give it any thought while I dealt with LB and coffee and the main cabin’s fire. The cabin warmed up very nicely, the fire not having been given much opposition, and when I went back into the bedroom at 6:30ish the temperature difference was instantly noticeable – and not in the way it usually is that time of the morning. At last I’d sucked a bottle dry.
This was ten days of running the thing like an old lady, mid- to high-fifties from evening to mid-morning, being really profligate. In the old Interim Lair a full bottle wouldn’t have lasted six days. With this space heater in the new bedroom it lasted ten.
Maybe at some point I’ll get a diverter regulator like they use on RVs so I can pair up bottles, since the bottle is virtually guaranteed to suck dry in the middle of the night.
Though I can’t offer an explanation, I’m also happy to notice that the pilot is lighting more readily than it did at first. When we first installed the thing, the spark lighter was almost useless. The only sure way to light the pilot was to remove the sight glass and light the flame with a butane lighter. But the last two times the sparker has been enough. First time I figured it was because there was still propane in the line and the firebox hot, but this time it was cold and empty and I still had no trouble with the pilot.
At that rate of consumption it would take 12* full bottles to get from here to mid-March, which – when I put it that way – is an appalling lot of propane. But barring new emergencies I really could afford to do that – and of course this isn’t Minnesota. High desert winter is episodic; sometimes it’ll dip much colder than that, and sometimes there’ll be periods not that cold at all. Best thing to do is throw a comforter on the bed, throttle it back a bit but not go all worst-case and use the heater only for extinction-level nights.
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*9, I mean! Arithmetic is hard.
Hooray for data! And optimistic outcomes. Good report.
I hope gigs and blog readers will keep you supplied with enough cash to keep you supplied with enough propane. And do get that diverter. I remember using one during my time as your high-desert neighbor (heating with a Mr. Buddy and sometimes with the oven). It was a godsend.
Another interesting data point would be to determine how much it costs to run that pilot light,. You could do that next summer when you definitely won’t be burning fuel for heat. Weigh a bottle, use it to run the pilot for a week, weigh the bottle, do the math.
Yup.
RE: larger tanks. You’ve already vetoed 100 pounders for the obvious reasons, and IIRC there’s no way a propane delivery truck could make it to the Lair.
100 gallon tanks are available in vertical and horizontal styles, and don’t necessarily need to be fully filled (100 gallons of propane is about 425 lbs + the tank). Were a horizontal one to be securely strapped to a suitable trailer, could it be successfully towed to “town,” filled to a reasonable degree, and successfully towed back?
A 30 lb cylinder holds about 7 gallons which = 10 days, so 70 gallons would = 100 days which would almost cover Dec 1 – March 15.
And, would the “authorities” object strenuously enough to be a consideration?
I’m not good at judging how much is left either, I’ve got a scale like this one I use for checking fullness of propane tanks. https://www.amazon.com/Next-shine-Electronic-Digital-Hanging-Luggage/dp/B014R09SU6