Gas cylinder bottles have a variety of uses in both a household and commercial context. It facilitates a variety of daily functions, such as cooking, heating, and powering appliances.
As useful as gas bottles are, they come with their fair share of inherent risks. Under the wrong conditions, these gas bottles can cause explosions, fires, and gas leaks that can damage assets and property and harm people.
Considering this, it’s important to be proactive in safely storing gas bottles in your building.
This doesn’t just entail putting your gas bottle in a cabinet and calling it a day; it’s a multi-step process, requiring a nuanced and proper approach to keep the cylinder from tipping over or reacting to the constantly shifting temperature of its enclosure.
In this article, we’ll break down the things you should consider to properly store gas bottles. These tips will help you with everything you need to know about safely storing gas bottles at home or the workplace.
Let’s start!
- Put Indoor Gas Cans in a Dedicated Storage Unit
Gas bottles are hazardous goods, meaning that handling them is of utmost importance and needs to follow strict compliance.
In countries like Australia, there are standards like the AS 4332 that provide comprehensive guidelines on the proper storage and management of gas bottles in an indoor setting. It also provides descriptors on the optimal gas can containers needed for storage purposes.
Only a few storage containers in the market are fully compliant with local laws on gas can storage, such as the heavy-duty gas bottle storage from STOREMASTA.
High-quality gas bottle storage cabinets are built with a sturdy powder coat, bolt-down plates, cylinder plates, and robust padlock systems. By relying on these systems for gas storage units, you can exponentially increase the safety of your property.
- Stay Within Allowable Gas Storage Limits
It’s critical for property owners to stick with the regulatory limits imposed by their local council regarding indoor gas cylinder storage.
In the United Kingdom, the maximum allowable quantity of butane canisters a residential homeowner can have is 30 kilograms or two 15-kg butane canisters. The allowable limit may differ from country to country, but there will be directives that you can look up to ensure you’re staying within allowable limits.
The purpose these implementations are in place is simple: it helps keep the surroundings around your household and commercial property largely safe in case of an accident. A lower amount of gas cans limits the impact of a gas leak or explosion, thus keeping the broader community safe even in a worst-case scenario.
For specific gas types, such as propane, homeowners are mandated to place these gas cans outside in a secured and well-ventilated storage compartment. This safety precaution is followed to minimise the chance of an outbreak like a gas leak or fire causing major disruption within a building.
Above all, be sure to review your country’s local policies and standards to ensure that your gas bottle limit is within the bounds of local law.
- Ensure Optimal Outdoor Conditions
Gas cans are ideally stored outdoors—but that doesn’t mean you should store them unguarded and out in the open.
You should put these gas cans in dedicated storage containers to ensure that unauthorised personnel or poor weather conditions don’t tamper with these potentially hazardous equipment.
An ideal outdoor setup has a few key characteristics that must be followed to ensure optimal safety. The first thing to consider is to ensure that the outdoor storage is well-ventilated. This prevents gasses and vapours from building up and potentially bursting in a chain reaction.
Another key consideration is roof and floor protection. You wouldn’t want your gas cans to be exposed to rain, or worse, unrelenting heat.
Constant exposure not only leads to a slow but steady corrosion process, but it also presents a hazard risk as it can heat up the gas bottle enough to reach its flash point—or the temperature in which it explodes.
You should also refrain from having your storage areas situated away from machinery, naked flames, and electric circuits.
Keep your gas bottles away from flammable materials as well, such as dry leaves and branches, as these can accelerate the spread of fire in the rare event an explosion does ignite from your gas cans.
Even with these risks, outdoor storage is still the superior option for gas bottle storage in terms of safety. By ensuring that you’re prepared for the aforementioned outdoor risks, you can minimise any potential outbreaks and have peace of mind with a fairly safe property.
- Position Your Gas Bottles Upright and Lock in Place
Whether you’ve situated your gas bottles indoors or outdoors, it’s important to lock them in place in an upright position. This ensures that your gas bottles won’t fall over, potentially denting the floor (and the container itself) at best, and causing a nasty gas leak at worst.
You should chain the gas bottles in a cage to ensure that they don’t shift over or fall even with the slightest amount of pressure.
Some may wonder why you need to store gas bottles vertically instead of horizontally. The reason for this is because of the design of the gas cylinder, as situated atop it is a safety valve.
By storing the gas bottle horizontally, the safety valve’s effectiveness can be rendered unstable, causing a gas leak or an imbalance of pressure. This can also happen if you roll gas cans as a mode of transportation. This is a no-no—using a gas can cart should be the mode of choice.
The risk of safety valve damage is even more pronounced if you stack multiple gas bottles atop each other—which is highly discouraged even if you’re putting them in an upright and vertical position.
Keeping the gas cans upright is ultimately the better option for maintaining safety when handling and storing these flammable goods.
- Dispose of Empty Gas Bottles Appropriately
Once a gas tank is emptied out, you shouldn’t leave it just sitting on your property and taking up space. It’s essential to dispose of these empty bottles appropriately—and that doesn’t mean throwing them in the general waste or recycling bin.
Instead, the best course of action is to drive them over to a local recycling facility that can handle that specific type of trash. But before you do that, be sure to loosen the safety valve to ensure that the contents within the gas can have been fully emptied out.
These facilities have drop-off and collection units where you can throw your gas cans and other hazardous goods out in an approved manner. If you’re unfamiliar with the whereabouts of this facility in your local community, search for a gas can collection point on a search engine, make a call, and start from there.
That said, it’s often best to perform a manual drop-off beforehand and acquaint yourself with the people within the site first. This way, they can clarify anything that needs clarification and help orient you with the proper disposal process specific to your community.
- Educate Ground Personnel on Handling Gas Bottles
You won’t always be on-site or at home to supervise your gas canisters (and, let’s face it, there are hundreds of other little things to worry about).
Fortunately, you don’t have to supervise your gas container storage units 24/7. You can leave resources and safety instructions to your family or ground personnel so that they can handle gas bottles in the most informed and safest manner possible.
For starters, educate your family or staff members on proper gas bottle safety practices. Teach them about the nature of gas bottles and the things that can go wrong by failing to store it properly.
Educate them about the correct methods of storing and transporting these containers as well. Also, let them in on how to notice if a gas leak is happening or any visual cues on whether a gas can is improperly stored or not.
By providing clear guidelines on gas bottle safety, you can make your home or the workplace a safe space even when you’re not around. This, in turn, can help you have peace of mind knowing that the hazard risk is effectively mitigated.
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