aemeijers wrote:

Pete C. wrote:
" wrote:
On Sun, 16 May 2010 09:31:57 -0400, "h" wrote:

I might believe you if you mean by area, but not if you mean by
population. I'm not aware of any densely-populated areas (at least in the
eastern half of US) that do not have NG available in the street. I'm in a
semi-rural area several miles from city limits, no water or sewer, but
every house has a gas meter. At least in this part of country, people
only have to use bottle gas if they live WAY out in the boonies, where
there were not enough houses per mile to make running the gas line
profitable.

--
aem sends...
We don't have NG here in upstate NY, about 20 minutes from Albany, 5 minutes
outside of town. I'm in the boonies, but certainly not WAY out. They sent
out a survey (supposedly 25,000 copies) about 10 years ago and they said
only 5 people (myself included) wanted NG. They didn't say how many bothered
to return the survey, however.
About ten years ago Vermont Gas went around and asked how many on our street
(maybe 20 houses) wanted gas. As it worked out, the only money out of my
pocket was $50 to have a clean-out installed in the chimney (should have been
there) and $12/mo for the burner rental. I hate oil heat, so sure! The gas
company paid for all installation costs, and even came back that spring and
re-seeded the lawn. Only one family on the street refused.

I love oil heat, or at least I did when I was in the northeast. No
reliance on any outside utility during nasty storms, 300 gal of heat and
generator fuel on site and ready at all times. That works out to the
ability to operate for at least two full weeks (more if the tank is near
full at the start) without any issues during one of the northeast's
killer ice storms.

Granted nat gas service doesn't have an outage very often, but it does
have outages, where oil never has outages. Nat gas also blows up at
least one home a month, while oil has never blown up a home.

Best hope your tank is always near-full then. If there is a massive
sustained electric outage for the region, you won't be getting any
refills, once your local supplier empties his tanks, assuming HE has a
backup generator.

I never ran into such an issue, the region just wasn't likely to
experience anything that would take more than a week to recover from. If
I were in a higher risk area I would have simply added a second 300gal
tank (max 600gal per fire rated space). I also had a 55gal primary tank
for the generator and only switched to drawing from the big tank if that
55 was getting low.


As to NG blowups- simple housekeeping reduces the accidental explosion
risk to near-zero. Compare that to the massive cleanup costs from even a
minor tank leak (assuming the local authorities find out.) I think the
odds favor NG by a wide margin.

Ask the folks killed in those nat gas explosions. As for leaks,
secondary containment for indoor tanks is pretty trivial, and the
containment only need to match the largest individual tank, so for two
300gal tanks, you only need 300gal worth of containment which equates to
only a foot or so dam around the tanks.