# Methane for propane appliances?



## RNprepper

UNIQUE 2 - Unique Off-Grid Appliances
UNIQUE 6 W - Unique Off-Grid Appliances

Is there any reason these appliances could not be run on methane? I intend to "clean" my methane by running it through water to remove sulfur.


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## PaulS

The burners will need to be adjusted to get more air and you should use less fuel so the "jets" will have to be reduced in size too. 
Methane is a "pure" hydrocarbon and does not have Oxygen attached to the molecule like propane and alcohol. You also have to keep methane buffered or at pressures below 30 psi or it will spontaneously detonate (10 psi is considered the maximum pressure if it is exposed to air).


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## RNprepper

PaulS said:


> The burners will need to be adjusted to get more air and you should use less fuel so the "jets" will have to be reduced in size too.
> Methane is a "pure" hydrocarbon and does not have Oxygen attached to the molecule like propane and alcohol. You also have to keep methane buffered or at pressures below 30 psi or it will spontaneously detonate (10 psi is considered the maximum pressure if it is exposed to air).


Thanks so much for the info, Paul. I think my methane collector will maintain pressures at lower psi. Putting a pressure gauge on the pipe would be a good idea. I've seen lots of videos of methane being used as a cooking fuel, so why not also use it for a small propane fridge? Easy to make, and free, renewable fuel.


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## paraquack

Most natural gas and bottle gas coming into your house is running around 1/2 (0.5) PSI. When I was working on my camper or RV, I had to use a water column to measure the pressure at about 11 inches of water.


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## HuntingHawk

Two things. First is getting the pressure right & consistent plus being it doesn't burn as hot as natural gas or LP gas the jets need opened as I understand.


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## Slippy

I was about to lean in to provide a bit of hot air but after PaulS' usual intellectual reply, I think my reply would be considered nothing but flatulence.:-?


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## Smitty901

You would need to pressurize the Methane not all that easy to. They did a lot of experimenting with using Methane as a replacement for LP in the 80's it never panned out.
The collection and compressing was a big part of the problem.
Methane is however collected by running a tube from your source and burning it with out pressurizing . They do that in China from pig manure pits. It is also how they burn it off in land fills.


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## RNprepper

HuntingHawk said:


> Two thinks. First is getting the pressure right & consistent plus being it doesn't burn as hot as natural gas or LP gas the jets need opened as I understand.


So this would make me think that I should save my money on an appliance and just keep the methane for cooking. But a simple pressure regulator would work, wouldn't it, for keeping consistency?
I guess the main difference between using methane for intermittent cooking vs continual running of an appliance would be the amount of methane that could be generated and stored. I plan to use two 300 gal water totes for production and a 30 gal barrel inverted over a 50 gal barrel for storage and pressurization. (Pressure maintained with weights on top the 30 gal.) That should be way more than we need for cooking. It would be nice if it could run a small fridge or freezer as well.


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## GTGallop

Propane burners can easily be re-calibrated to accept methane - but you need an engineering degree from Princeton or one of a hand full of lucky ******** that managed to figure it out with otter hair and some beeswax.


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## Mad Trapper

PaulS said:


> The burners will need to be adjusted to get more air and you should use less fuel so the "jets" will have to be reduced in size too.
> Methane is a "pure" hydrocarbon and does not have Oxygen attached to the molecule like propane and alcohol. You also have to keep methane buffered or at pressures below 30 psi or it will spontaneously detonate (10 psi is considered the maximum pressure if it is exposed to air).


???

Propane = C3H8 hydrocarbon

Did you mean propanol?

Curious about OP. How you going to generate the methane?


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## HuntingHawk

In direct reply to RN's last post, there use to a be series on TV on alternate power that three engineers were give various scenarios. They had an unlimited supply of "sludge" because they were at a daily farm. I remember they first tried barrels but after several tries of trying to fix the problem of the barrels getting cockeyed they gave up on them. It was the strength bands added to the barrels was causing the problem.
They ended up purpose building the drums from some sheet steel. They actually had to rebuild those because of the gap left with the over where sheets of metal were attached. The rebuild was done by the sheets butted together then sheets put outside & riveted in place. Inside barrel the connection pieces were done on the inside. Still had air leaks so had to end up DC welding the seams were the sheets of metal met.

Their problems really started when they tried running their first batch of methane. They had to put weight on it to get pressure but that pressure had to be centered so as not to cock the inner drum. They did use a backhoe to try to for pressure but decided they would need to weld a pipe to the center of the inner drum to attach weight to. Test sample their methane would barely burn. One of them figured out the problem was all the air that was in the tank had deluted the methane. So then they were needing a bleed valve to remove air as the methane was produced.
So they removed the inner drum to do the modifications to it which required both a backhoe plus a hay bale mover used as a forklift. But their problems weren't over. How do you remove the old manure so you can add fresh? "This is a bunch of shit". "But the problem is its the same old shit". Hole cut in the outter barrel with ball valve & welded on & they had to set up to move the old manure to a safe place to dump. They ended up adding the same to the top of the inner barrel to fill with fresh.


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## Medic33

ahh, no-bad idea.


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## HuntingHawk

They also had to set some bricks on the inside between the drums that the inner barrel would go the whole way down allowing them to get more of the old sludge out. Pretty sure they ended up using a water filter for the methane.
They abandoned the valve ontop of the inner drum & instead went with a test line at ground level. They got a natural gas tester & experimented to see where the gauge needed to be for a good flame & marked the gauge itself. Had to be checked twice a day to determine how much air to bleed off. 

Once they got all that done then they had to modify an old riding mower engine to run off the methane. Then set up the drive tire with a belt to run an alternator. Not sure why they chose an alternator versus a generator. Then it was which gear to put it in to get the right speed for the alternator to run for a good output. Several hours after getting everything running the engine on the old riding mower failed.

This was actually a half hour show which might be able to be found on youtube but I had gotten lucky & saw a three hour special which was "The making of ...."

Three experienced engineers, a 150 year old dairy farm with almost endless materials & the heavy equipment & yet they had so much trouble to get the system working makes me wonder if the manure would be better served fertilizing the fields.


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## HuntingHawk

On the other hand, there is a series called Hillbilly Blood. One of the shows from scratch they built a gasifier to directly run a smaller gasoline powered electric generator. I really believe that would be a better choice. 
Now, RNprepper was saying methane to cook with but with a gasifier you can make electricity to cook with.


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## RNprepper

There are number of homemade methane generator plans on line, and a number of youtube videos. Methane is used all over the world as a cooking fuel. Food/garden scraps and/or manure is used. I have plenty of both and it seems to be a fairly simple technology as use for cooking. Maybe the dairy farmers were trying to make a huge processor with large amounts of manure.


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## HuntingHawk

Yes, what they were building was almost on an industrial scale as the idea was to power the entire milking parlor.


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## RNprepper

HuntingHawk said:


> Yes, what they were building was almost on an industrial scale as the idea was to power the entire milking parlor.


Well, if cities can do it with the dumps and landfills, you would think a dairy could do it. In fact, I recall a dairy farm that did just that - harvested methane and basically ran the entire operation on the power they generated. I think I saw it on a TV documentary, but it was a while ago.


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## HuntingHawk

I hadn't found the name of that series but one of the crew was retired british military engineer Dick Strawbridge who was also on Junkyard Wars several times.


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## HuntingHawk

But burning off methane from a landfill there is no concern about varying pressure or BTUs.


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## RNprepper

HuntingHawk said:


> But burning off methane from a landfill there is no concern about varying pressure or BTUs.


But they are using the landfill methane for energy production. So they must have a more sophisticated system than just use as a cooking fuel.


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## HuntingHawk

If it was easy or cheap to do I would expect every landfill would be doing it. By what I can tell very few do it. JMO


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## paraquack

The ones around my area back in ILLannoyed just burnt it off. Making it, collecting it is the easy part, compressing it to get it into the pipeline would be the expensive part.


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