Jeff Wisnia wrote:
Larry Jaques wrote:

On Sat, 7 Jan 2006 17:34:40 -0800, with neither quill nor qualm,
"Steve B" quickly quoth:


I ALWAYS inverted my tanks. The big tank will sit nicely on its
collar on a wood picnic table, with the smaller tank at a right angle.



I thought the OPD valves on new tanks prevented overfilling OR any
possible liquid propane discharge. Am I wrong? I'd rather refill
my old 1 pound tanks if possible.



I think you might be incorrect on that one. I've had a HF adaptor for
years now, and invert the larger tank when refilling the smaller ones.

IIRC the overfill protection valve is a float which rises to shut off
the flow passage when the tank is overfilled with liquid while standing
upright. When you invert the tank as when using the HF adaptor to refill
a small tank the float rises towards the bottom of the tank, which
leaves the valve passage open, if there's a decent amount of liquid in
the larger tank.

Course I could be wrong about that, maybe the latest valves have a
secondary mechanism to close off the valve passage when the tank is
inverted?

One thing I always wondered about was overfilling a smaller tank so that
it might vent (or G-d forbid burst?) if the surrounding temperature
rose. I'm chicken about that kind of thing so I weighed a couple of just
purchased tanks on the kitchen scale, wrote the weights on them and
check them after refilling to make sure they're not above their marked
weights.

Agreement/disagreement or clarification of any ofwhat I just wrote would
be welcomed.

Jeff


Well, I had to go and see if my memory was playing tricks on me so I
tried topping off of a partially empty Bernzomatic bottle from an
inverted 20 lb OPD valved tank. (A "Blue Rhino" I'd swapped out my last
non OPD tank for a couple of years ago.)

Even though the 20 pounder was been sitting outside in about 35F
Taxachusetts temperature, I brought it into the garage and after putting
the small tank in the kitchen freezer for 15 minutes I was able to
squirt a half pound of gas into it in roughly 15 seconds.

YMMV,

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia

(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"Truth exists; only falsehood has to be invented."