Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hie a Marshal Brain with today's question, when you're buying gas appliances, why do you always have to specify whether you're using LPG or natural gas? If you've ever shopped for a gas grill, gas fireplace, logs, a gas stove, or a gas dryer, you know that you're always asked to specify whether you plan to use it with natural gas or LPG, also known as liquefied
petroleum gas. The reason you have to get it right is because LPG and natural gas have very different properties. Natural gas is just that it's natural. If you sink a well in the right spot, natural gas flows out of the ground. It's mostly methane or H four. Liquefied petroleum gas, on the other hand, is a product of crude oil distillation. It contains mostly propane or C three H eight. Propane has a very nice property that when you can press it, it easily condenses into a liquid.
This means that it's much easier to store in a tank than natural gas, which doesn't compress easily. You can see the difference between natural gas and LPG. Most easily. When you buy a gas stove, normally you're supplied with two sets of jets, one set for natural gas and one set for LPG. You install one jet in each burner. The jet is simply a little screwing cap with a
whole drilled in it. The difference is that the hole in the jet for natural gas is bigger, about twice as big as the whole in the jet for LPG. The reason for this difference is because LPG contains much more energy than natural gas does. A cubic foot of natural gas contains something like a thousand btu of energy. A cubic foot of propane contains maybe two thousand five btu. You can see that if you take a gas appliance set up for natural gas and you run it on LPG,
the apply this is going to run hot. In some appliances, that extra heat is a fire hazard. In others, like a gas grill, it means that the grill is either going to be way too hot or way too cold if you use the wrong jets. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Go to how stuff works dot com.