3 ms·

I am surprised that only some countries require the regulator to be outside. Just seems like a relatively simple thing to do. Does having the regulator outside

I am surprised that only some countries require the regulator to be outside. Just seems like a relatively simple thing to do. Does having the regulator outside require more maintenance or something?

VLM 8y ago
You have to remember that natgas is extremely old, like mid industrial revolution era. Homes had natgas before they had electricity, usually. In the early days they billed on the number of gas jets for illumination but once gas stoves and furnaces became a thing they needed some way to measure, and there's some weird technology out there involving something like an archimedes screw sitting in a couple inches of anti-freeze driving low friction clockwork. Now a days its probably optical sensors instead of clockwork but whatever. Two engineering topics are being missed; flow rate thru an orifice is strongly non-linear, and there are no hermetically sealed large scale transport technologies. Its staggeringly impressive that like 99% of electricity pumped into the grid makes it out the other end. Its not practical from an engineering standpoint to operate a leak free material transport pipeline. There's plenty of engineering guidelines such that a leak rate ten times lower than could theoretically cause an explosion is quite acceptable, until some idiot accidentally applies a 10x overpressure forcing open orifices permanently and increasing the leakage flow rate 200x and then kaboom. Its kind of like automobile gas stations... it would be nice to never have a leak and LARP that we'll be very serious and studious about never having a petroleum leak, but that mindset leads to design and operations decisions which become environmental disasters when the inevitable happens. Better to build everything with the assumption the underground tank will leak one liter per month than to plan the leak rate will be zero. Also no level of idiot proofing is perfect; that leak-tolerant station design will still fail if some truck driver pumps 2000 gallons into a 1000 gallon tank while not paying attention. There's also safety tolerance / clickbait issues. Natgas averages about ten customers dead per year in the USA. Its very difficult to get stats for in-house mis-adventure but it seems about three hundred die per year from in-home electrocution, so its kinda a rounding error. Food related illness (food poisoning leading to dehydration leading to death) kills about 5000 per year in the usa per google (which seems high?) so you're about 30 times more likely to electrocute yourself at home than die in a natgas explosion, and 500 times more likely to be killed by whats in your cooking pot than whats heating your cooking pot. Given that, more investment to prevent natgas deaths would likely result in more deaths from other causes; taking money away from "stop drinking corn syrup" or "cook meat to 165F" will kill more people than a 10% improvement in long term natgas death stats would save.

I am surprised that only some countries require the regulator to be outside. Just seems like a relatively simple thing to do. Does having the regulator outside require more maintenance or something?

VLM 8y ago

You have to remember that natgas is extremely old, like mid industrial revolution era. Homes had natgas before they had electricity, usually. In the early days they billed on the number of gas jets for illumination but once gas stoves and furnaces became a thing they needed some way to measure, and there's some weird technology out there involving something like an archimedes screw sitting in a couple inches of anti-freeze driving low friction clockwork. Now a days its probably optical sensors instead of clockwork but whatever. Two engineering topics are being missed; flow rate thru an orifice is strongly non-linear, and there are no hermetically sealed large scale transport technologies. Its staggeringly impressive that like 99% of electricity pumped into the grid makes it out the other end. Its not practical from an engineering standpoint to operate a leak free material transport pipeline. There's plenty of engineering guidelines such that a leak rate ten times lower than could theoretically cause an explosion is quite acceptable, until some idiot accidentally applies a 10x overpressure forcing open orifices permanently and increasing the leakage flow rate 200x and then kaboom. Its kind of like automobile gas stations... it would be nice to never have a leak and LARP that we'll be very serious and studious about never having a petroleum leak, but that mindset leads to design and operations decisions which become environmental disasters when the inevitable happens. Better to build everything with the assumption the underground tank will leak one liter per month than to plan the leak rate will be zero. Also no level of idiot proofing is perfect; that leak-tolerant station design will still fail if some truck driver pumps 2000 gallons into a 1000 gallon tank while not paying attention. There's also safety tolerance / clickbait issues. Natgas averages about ten customers dead per year in the USA. Its very difficult to get stats for in-house mis-adventure but it seems about three hundred die per year from in-home electrocution, so its kinda a rounding error. Food related illness (food poisoning leading to dehydration leading to death) kills about 5000 per year in the usa per google (which seems high?) so you're about 30 times more likely to electrocute yourself at home than die in a natgas explosion, and 500 times more likely to be killed by whats in your cooking pot than whats heating your cooking pot. Given that, more investment to prevent natgas deaths would likely result in more deaths from other causes; taking money away from "stop drinking corn syrup" or "cook meat to 165F" will kill more people than a 10% improvement in long term natgas death stats would save.