Calling Hank Hill... I need some propane help

Hello everyone,

I have been slowly gathering items for my brew rig. I just got some propane burners and I need some help getting the right regulator to go with the burner orifice. I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to solve this problem.

I purchaced this guy from Agri Supply http://www.agrisupply.com/burner-cast-low-presure-multi-hole-/p/40282/cn/5400000/

The description only said low pressure and 75,000 BTUs so I assumed that it ment i could use the 11" WC propane regulator that I already have. Well long story short, the two dont work well together.

I swaped out the orifice and regulator for one from a different burner that ran on 10 PSI with a size 55 orifice opening and the burner worked although it did seem to run hotter than normal. This leeds me to believe that the casting does little to determine the BTUs and it is really determined by the combination of regulator pressure and orifice size.

Upon further inspection I think that the original orifice opening is to small to be low pressure. I measured it with my wire bits and found that it is size 60. I found a orifice/pressure/BTU chart online that puts the needed opening around size 40. Here are the charts http://energy.growmark.com/propane/Chapter9.html (chart toward the bottom) http://www.joppaglass.com/burner/highp_chart.html

I dont know enough about this to know if this is correct or not and was hoping that someone could chime in and let me know if these charts are correct or if there is a better resourse I should check out.

Thanks in advance

The Orifice chart is reasonably accurate for this application, drilling out the orifice will let you operate the burner on low pressure.

Thanks Kladue I will drill the orifice out and see how she works. I just did not want to shoot first and ask questions later.

I wonder if I just got a bad one that slipped throu or if the whole "low pressure" claim was incorrect. But then again, compaired with some of those 200,000 BTU, 30 PSI burners maybe 5 - 10 PSI is concidered low pressure now a days.

When you drop the pressure to 11" THE btu's drop also, it is a function of the amount of air that can be induced at lower pressure. Start with a smaller orifice size and test to see if air shutter is fully open, if not then you can increase the drill size and test until air shutter is nearly 100% open.