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Monday, December 7, 2020

Gas Leak

Gas Leak Bubble
You can see the crack at the base of the bubble

A faint odor of gas in the house Uniberp is renovating told him there was a problem with the gas line connecting his new, tankless water heater.

After reading extensively user stories about umpteen possibilities of exhaust rebreathing and backflow due to roof angles and literally soaking all the joints liberally with gas detector soap, I had come to the conclusion that it was the main solenoid, but I was wrong. That bubble never appeared before. Perhaps the shape of the tiny crack made a fine jet that failed to produce a bubble, and only when it widened over time did the velocity slow enough to be contained by the surface tension. of the bubble.

It took months to find this, for some reason. Tiny crack in the fitting below the bubble. I used several bottles of detector and it never showed a bubble until today.  The crack must have expanded some. It's connected to the 190k Takagi tankless hot water heater. 

There's a union just above the picture. It took all of 10 minutes to replace, I had all those joints apart previously. It was maddening.

I was just about angry, and even bought a $35 gas detector (mostly because I had to spend $30 more to get the $35 Paypal rebate).

Kmoon Combustible gas detector $62

It's pretty cool, actually, and very sensitive. I can send it to you as a Christmas present.

 

1 comment:

xoxoxoBruce said...

I was checking a couple hundred feet of copper tubing we had assembled to heat a pool deck, before they poured the concrete. I'd put 100 psi air in it and go around with the bubble soap checking joints. It wouldn't hold pressure but it wouldn't blow bubbles anywhere. It drove me nuts until one joint I'd soaped several times started bubbling like crazy. With some experimenting I discovered the pressure had to be under 30 psi for that configuration or it would blow the soap away before it could bubble. Later I found 30 psi wasn't gospel but it was a good place to look. In your situation you didn't have that option but it's good option to file away.