mack1

Hi Snoopdogie187,

Here are some tid-bits that I would like to put forth. There was a time when Natural Gas was king. It came out of the ground in that state and still does. It actually had no smell and was dangerous because of that. They added some stink to it so if you had a leak, you could smell it. It was piped to cities where houses were close and a short distribution piping system had a lot of cutomers on the grid. It wasn't profitable to put pipes out to the rurial areas. Petrolem refineries found that they got something similar in the oil refinering process. They called it propane or butane (probably some small difference in the two). They also found that if you put it under pressure, it would turn into a liquid state, but the pressure was greater than what was used by natural gas and the BTU output was a little different from natural gas. You could put a lot of cubic feet of gas into a container if it was in liquid state. That was a good solution to the rural distribution problem. Folks in the country could use butane which was hauled to them in liquid state and put in tanks at the houses. No distribution piping needed, just into the house from the storage tank.

This part might be of interest to you. There was a time when gas appliances were sold with two sets of jets. One for butane and one for natural gas. Butane was used at a higher pressure and the hole in the jet was smaller. If you used natural gas, you screwed on the jet with the larger orfice and for butane, you used the jet with the smaller orfice. The rest of the equipment was the same, ie., the air/gas mixing chamber and the burner. The mixing chamber had a slotted plate that could be rotated to allow more or less air into the mixing chamber. That plate was rotated such that you got the nice blue flame with no red in it. The red part of the flame represented oxygen starved gas ignition. Too much oxygen would cause the flame to rise up above the hole in the burner.

Based on the above, you might find that your stove will convert to butane/propane with less effort than you might think. Pilot lights, would be an addition and more effort.

Best of luck to you,
Mack1