Thread: How old is that gas bottle?

Originally Posted by soundman

From memory the issue is...you can not fill a free standing cylinder at an LPG bouser.

If you drove the fork lift to the bouser with the cylinder attached and it had the correct connection, you could fill it....but not if you had a free standing cylinder.

again to my understanding there is no requirement to bleed a cylinder when filling from a bouser...filling is pumped and fill stop is bassed on pressure.

cheers

The free standing cylinder may, in fact probably is an issue, but a forklift gas cylinder has different valving to Autogas cylinders as fitted to cars and there is a bleed screw on the side of the valve that must be opened when being filled, very much similar to the way barbeque gas cylinders were filled at service stations in years gone by. You open the bleed valve, turn on the gas from the larger cylinder/bowser, fill until liquid starts spitting out the bleed valve, shut off the larger cylinder/bowser and finally shut the bleed valve. You had to be careful not to turn on the valve too quickly or the hose burst protection valve in the line was tricked into sensing a burst hose and cut off gas flow, particularly on cold mornings. When the gas truck came to fill our 300Kg cylinder, he opened a similar bleed valve on the cylinder before pumping gas too.
After filling forklift cylinders from the Autogas came to a halt, (we were told by the gas company that it was due to a change in regulations due to there being accidents caused by failing to open the bleed screw), probably 20+ years ago now, we had a 300Kg cylinder installed in the yard and did it ourselves which was much more satisfactory all round - forklifts seem to only ever run out of gas late at night, in the pouring rain with a load suspended.

So we have two critical issues.
not having a connector compatable with an autogas pump nozzle, and requiring the use of a bleed screw.

Both matters would exclude filling fork bottles on a service station drive way.

A couple of my local service ststions used to have adaptors to fill a number of gas bottles from a gas pump in the past.......but that whole idea has been outlawed

To my knoweledge there are 3 methods where LPG bottles can be filled.....and they all revolve around methods of preventing over fill.

Filling by weight.....only done in gas facilities.
Filling by pressure....as in autogas installed in vehicles....if a cylinder is suitable for pressure filling at a bouser..it will have the correct fitting.
Filling by use of overflow.....everything else.


To fill by overflow the gas botlle must be upright

cheers

I'm fairly sure that the Autogas and the fork cylinder had compatible fittings as it was a very simple and quick operation to refill them.
When the ban was first imposed, we were unaware and it had to be me, the apprentice who was given the job of taking the cylinder to be refilled. Of course this turned into a much longer and drawn out process than usual because the cylinder had to be filled from the barbie gas at the servo and when I returned to work nearly two hours later, the reception was not pleasant at all. The boss didn't believe me at first. I should add that he had been a forklift salesman for many years prior and had filled his share of cylinders in that time. Anyway several hours of heated phone calls ensued before the explanation previously mentioned was the final outcome.

Argon cylinder i bought from power10gas has a date of 9/2014 which i guess adds up if they are selling you a cylinder.