Natural Gas and Propane Hybrid

[artbrau]

Awesome score on that fan and hood! My problem with the ebay-ish route was I needed 6ft, not 48 in, so I made the hood myself.

You can check out my approach to ventilation here, which is similar to hophead's situation. You can also see the bin where Asian Food Service pulled your burners from.

When I did the calcs for my impinged jet burners I figured each one was equivalent to a 6 burner Viking so you need about 1000 cfm as you noted.

Just make sure you have a CO detector with a digital readout (I use two for belt and suspenders. One also detects gas leaks). Now that I have run my rig through several batches I find 1000 cfm is more than enough. When I ran my fans (exhaust and make-up) at low speed to keep the noise down I got the CO levels up to 40ppm in the brewery after about 1/2 hour with one burner going, which is still below the alarm trigger threshold. Cranking the fan cut it down to zero quick. I just had to crank the stereo too.:rockin:

 

[EarthBound]

Thanks everyone for the replies! Sorry for the delayed response.

I bought tips at the same site...

Thanks, Fletch! Those tips do fit my burners. And they are an amazing deal. But I have plenty of those now because of the 23-to-10 tip conversion performed in this thread: NG 23-to-10 tip conversion
What I was wondering is if the tips need to be different for propane, i.e., different size holes in the tips, different length of tips, etc. If so, I was wondering where I would buy them. I did find the plugs I need from that conversion thread.

Wouldn't it be easier to buy a second set of burners and just swap them out with a union fitting or some kind of quick disconnect fitting?

It's starting to seem like this is what I'll have to do. I just thought someone out there had done something like this and would chime in, but I guess not.

You can build a burner that works with both gasses. You won't have to swap any fittings if you build it right. I know they make boilers that run on either...

This is exactly what I want to do. Boilers? Like for a coal-burning power plant? I'm at one of those right now. It's where I work. Please let me know what else you know on this subject. It would be of great help to me and others trying to perform the same experiment.

...I thought maybe it would be easier to swap out the burners as opposed to messing up the threads in the cast iron to the nozzles. (Only because I heard it can happen due to it's brittleness)...

Yes, the threads are pretty damn brittle. That's probably going to be the major drawback of this experiment. I'll probably have to go with a seperate set of burners. I can afford afford it. I just didn't want to HAVE to afford it. I'd be proud to have a set of hybrid burners.

The NG may be delivered at too high a pressure for his burners to operate efficiently even if it is just 1 or 2 WC.
A dual regulator can be purchased. A couple companies I deal with ship their gas equipment with one for easy conversion.
You should only need to change the orifice. The tips don't usually care what gas is flowing. Best to call the manufacturer and ask. You probably would have had the answer to your question by now.

Good idea! I will contact them today. Hopefully, I get the information I'm looking for and I'm able to make this "duality" thing work. I'll post back with the results.

 

[EarthBound]

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[HopHead24]

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idk

 

[EarthBound]

idk

Yeah, me neither. Thanks anyway.

 

[EarthBound]

I suppose I'll update this thread now...

I plan on upgrading my brewstand with NG capability in the following way:

Currently, my brewstand has a propane support shelf that is easily removable.
I have already constructed/welded together a NG support shelf, and I already have the NG burners (23 tip chinese crap).
Therefore, I will be able to fairly easily interchange the two support shelves.
I will construct a second gas manifold just for NG.
Both manifolds can be mounted on the brewstand at the same time, so I won't have to change those out.

After all that is done, it won't take much work to switch from propane to NG: Disconnect the propane burners from the propane manifold, disonnect and remove the propane support shelf, connect the NG support shelf, connect the NG burners to the NG manifold. It should take less than half an hour to switch between the two.

I will get on this upgrade as soon as I install NG service to my brewhut. This upgrade will be the final hybrid upgrade to my brewstand.