On Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:25:05 -0500, Home Guy wrote:
the next step your neighbor is likely to take is
to throw a cigarette at it.



Cigarettes don't light liquid gasoline like they do in the movies, simply
because a cigarette is about 475°F (plus or minus 25°F) while the
ignition temperature of liquid gasoline is just slightly above that at
around 500°F. So, of course a very hot cigarette 'could' ignite liquid
gasoline - but not one thrown over the fence at me by my neighbor!

Fire is, of course, the biggest realistic danger.

Everyone manages that risk daily - for example, a one-car garage has
roughly 20 gallons of gasoline in it in metal or plastic gas tanks; a two
car garage has about 40, and a three-car garage has about 60 gallons of
gasoline in them all the time. It's way more dangerous to have gasoline
in a garage than outside, in a very airy structure to keep sun and water
off the equipment.

My gasoline is kept outside, in a very well ventilated shed (it's almost
not a shed, it's that well ventilated). Gas fumes in and of themselves
are not flammable but when mixed with air, then of course, they're highly
flammable in the right concentration near the floor of any enclosure.

The biggest danger is static electricity igniting fumes.

This can happen while fueling the vehicles at roughly 15 gallons per
minute from the automatic-shut-off 1/4 HP 12VDC electric fuel transfer
pump. To ward that off, the setup is well grounded, of course, with two
copper rods (for redundancy), and a 10BC fire extinguisher is always
nearby, just in case.

But a home filling station is no more dangerous than a commercial
gasoline filling station is, and, in fact, less dangerous if the puny
amounts of gasoline (55 gallons) are taken into account.