PROPANE CYLINDER MARKINGS
Typical re certification stamp:
MM XXX YY E
MM -> 2 digit re certification month
XXX ->3 character Re-qualifier’s registration number
YY -> 2 digit re certification year
E ->States the cylinder has been externally examined
WC -> Water capacity of the cylinder.
TW -> Tare weight of the cylinder (what the tank weighs empty)
ICC, DOT, BTE, CTC or TC -> Specification number eg. TC4BA240
10 89 -> Date of manufacture (October. 1989)
Propane cylinders must be re certified every 10 years. This means that the relief valve must be replaced and the cylinder must be visually inspected. A new stamp in embedded into the steel collar to show the latest inspection date. In order to replace the relief valve, the cylinder must be completely empty of propane. If the cylinder is not empty when brought to be re certified, the propane must be burnt off.
Propane cylinders may not be re certifiable due to excessive rust, pitting, gouging, or denting. Cylinders are not re certifiable if they have been involved in a fire, show signs of bulging, dented welds, or collars or foot rings that are broken or damaged.
Since I moved to the new house, I took all my solar stuff down, all that is left is some conduit, and a few other things that make holes in the roof. I’ll remove these when I’m ready to put a new roof on, later this year.
I’d like to avoid mounting panels on the house, this time. First of all I have plenty of space, so I shouldn’t have to, second, the roof has a much steeper angle, and will make work much harder, and the panels less efficient. Third, I think it will look better not having panels obvious from the street. For these reasons I am looking into ground mounting panels. Examples:
This will make placement much easier, and maintenance much easier. They will also run cooler as they wont be attached to a hot roof. Now just to see how hard this will be to get drawn, approved, and purchased.
I’m was invited to be on the beta program for wattvision’s product, and the hardware arrived today. It is a small sensor that attaches to the outside of your meter, and a small box that connects via wifi to the internet. took about 30 secs to install, and it works pretty well.
A lot has changed just in the past 30 days on this project. I’m running on the B-Rad fork of this, and currently my WDTV has:
Ethernet via a wii usb net adaptor, and thus it has IP.
Webserver
FTP Server
Telnet
Samba
Cron
It can also now mount CIFS or NFS shares for streaming goodness
Rss Feed reader scrolls across the bottom
Weather widget (for 5 day weather and temp high low)
Quick and dirty instructions
- Copy files to root of thumb drive
- plug thumb drive in
- plug network adaptor in
- boot
- finds new firmware
- install
- reboots
- note IP address on boot. (it will do strange things during its first boot)
- http://ip address/osd/weather
- Put in city and F
- save
- note cron error
- click to install cron
- http://ip address/osd/rss
- change rss feed
- http://ip address
- shares
- cifs shares
- enter share info
- Done
- Seems as though you need to leave these files in the root of an attached thumb/hd, otherwise it cant run the webserver/etc I just have a 1 gig thumb drive connected, but i’ve also putthe files on the hd that was attached.
You can find my archive at http://www.robpatton.com/wdtv/WDTVFiles.zip
I’ve also realized tonight, that this thing can play an .iso image of a dvd as well as a .mt2s (direct rip of a BD), an .mt, and mkv, divx, mpg1,2,4, h264, etc etc etc. I’m not sure what it CANT play, but I’m looking..
Propane is an interesting fuel. Unlike Gasoline or Diesel, its CLEAN burning, it never goes bad, and its safe to keep around. Its also a dandy way of getting your steaks from raw to mmm mmm good.I have several propane devices. BBQ grill, turkey cooker, infared heater, and generator. Since I have all these items, I have a bunch of propane tanks. In my hurricane prep work this weekend, I tried to sort out what tanks were full, and which were not.
In this process I learned:
Every tank will have “tare weight” stamped into it, indicating how much is weighs, empty.
A standard bbq grill tank, aka a 20 pound tank, weighs about 37 pounds, full. It weighs about 17 pounds, empty.I (somehow) have 3 tanks that weigh 21 pounds.
I can’t go get this refilled and just pay for 16 pounds of propane. Its an all or nothing deal with a fill of this size. Same goes if you do a Blue Rhino swap out.
It would be ideal to have a pump, and transfer the propane from tank to tank. To good to be true. They are to expensive to make it worth buying one, even though it looks very simple… The Krug Pump, has been around for 50 years.
Current Inventory:
8 – 20 pound
1 – 40 pound
1 – 100 pound
You’ve wondered to yourself, why is he always cleaning, how much could he have to do?
This is an example… I have boxes and boxes and boxes of “stuff” This is stuff:
I’ve crossed another milestone, a new record has been set here.
A new peak output, I’ve produced 16amps of 120v during the day on solar.
Next step should get me over 20amps! Perhaps this weekend?
Well, my good buddy Jim (and his son Alex) came over today to help me (read: let me watch him work) put the last 6 solar panels up on the roof.
Jim as been my solar teacher, years ahead of anything I’ve done. Hes great with helping preach the word of renewable energy. With his HUGE solar install, and his Plug-in Prius, he stays on the bleeding edge of Alternative Tech. He still insists on using his Sony Floppy disk camera, though…..
This go round we tried out a new flashing that the company makes, and it works VERY well.
Six of them to add for today’s install
Today’s upgrade yields me 50% more power, followed shortly by the tracker which will more than double what I had before today. It should be good times for free power…
All he asked is for some BBQ (actually he asked for Sonnys, he got Bubbalous) and a charge for his (nearly world famous) car….
With all the new changes around the place, as well as the Solar Power projects moving forward, it was just time to replace the Load Center in the house. For those that don’t know what that is, its the breaker panel you run to when your blow dryer blows a breaker. I’ve added so much stuff to the house, my 1973 load center was just overloaded with things that wanted space. As a cool note, everything (except the AC) in the house was kept running today. So today, for 6 hours, my house was entirely solar powered!
So here is the start mess, subpanel and all
This is in the middle, new panel in, but not wired up yet.
And this is the final Product, bottom left are the new GFIs
