I’m going to try to hard plumb the burners on my new brew stand this weekend. The Ace Hardware down the street can custom cut/thread black iron gas pipe, which is nice. But I’m not sure what diameter the pipe should be. I’ll be using propane, if that makes a difference. Any suggestions?
No experience with using propane yet, but I’m looking into getting a Blichmann Top Tier myself and they recommend using 1/2" pipe for the gas manifold.
1/2" is what I was thinking. I think it’s probably safe to trust Blichmann’s recommendation. Thanks!
When I replumbed my old system from jet burners to banjo burners I had a great deal of difficulty finding and configuring from 1/2 npt to whatever the burners took - I think they were 3/8 flare fittings. So looking at your burners and going backwards from there would be my advice.
Ah, good point. I’ll be using banjo burners. But couldn’t I just get a 1/4" x 1/2" flare to replace the one that comes with the banjo burner (which I think is 1/4" x 3/8")?
Any chance you will ever go natural gas? If so, you may want to go bigger. Also, will the plumbing be supporting the burners or will you have those bolted into your wind screens?
I highly doubt that I’ll go natural gas someday, but I guess I won’t say “never.” The burners will be bolted to the wind screens, so no worries about whether the pipes would be strong enough to support them. I’ll most likely run flexible gas tubing from the black pipe manifold to the individual burners.
I was able to get most of the plumbing put together over the weekend. But as I was putting the manifold together I started to wonder whether it will be an issue that I’m going from 3/8" ID propane hose (out from the tank) to 1/2" ID rigid black steel tubing to 1/2" ID flexible propane tubing (into the burners). Is it possible that this configuration would cause too much stress/pressure on any particular part of the manifold? I’m mostly referring to the fact that I’m going from 3/8" tubing to 1/2" tubing. I don’t know much about gas plumbing and I don’t want to get blowed up!
It shouldn’t matter. In theory you should go from larger to smaller diameter pipe especially if it will be splitting off but I think with high pressure LP the orifices will have overall control of the flow.
With my low pressure NG system I went from 1" to 1/2" which I worried would choke down the flow but the ring burners perform just fine.
I used 1/2" on my rig as well. The step down shouldn’t be an issue. Are you going high pressure or low pressure LP/NG?
I went from 1/2" black pipe to 1/4" needle valve back up to 3/4" black pipe on (2) 32 jet, burners im using a 10Lb regulator and they seem to burn just great.