New motorhome help please RE gas
Hi all,
we should be taking delivery of our brand new Auto Trail F74 later this week and parting with our trusted Carado T447. The carado has had gaslow fitted when we bought it 2nd hand so never really had to bother with gas bottles etc and just refilled at stations.
The auto train will have calor gas as we wont have the gaslow fitted. My question is i will need to obviously "rent" 2 gas bottles from calor can i just buy them as a new customer from a retailer near us that does them. Also do i need to buy regulators as well or will everything be fitted to the MH when we take delivery and i just need to hook up the bottles. I will of course ask the dealer when we do hand over etc but just want to get things ready prior to collecting.
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The motorhome should come with a regulator but not the bottles or pig tails unless you request the dealer to fit them which I have done in the past. I would ask the dealer to fit, that way at hand over he should be able to demonstrate everything on gas is working. What you get fitted depends on how you intend to use the van. If you plan a lot of off grid use you may want to consider at least having one refillable bottle fitted with a calor or similar bottle as back up.
peedee
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Talk to the supplying dealer and see what he can do for you. It’s the easiest thing to do.
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If you are likely to tour on the continent, a refillable system is the way to go as Calor is not available and you will have to get a different cylinder (and possibly a different pigtail) in virtually every country that you visit.
Refillable gas is usually much cheaper (80p - £1.10) a litre - I recently filled two 1kg Gaslow cylinders from empty and it cost just under £40; a lot cheaper than a single calor cylinder.
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When we switched to a Motorhome in 2019 I had a Gaslow system fitted. At the time it wasn’t about saving money more about as @Hja mentions, saving my back. As it happens we have used it for the odd excursion off grid and of course we take it with us when we shop at the supermarket while away. At these times the fridge is of course running on gas and being one of those tall ones, like I think in your van, it eats a lot of gas. Plus as @JimE says they can easily be refilled abroad. Even though not great gas users we will easily cover its cost, even if the cylinders should require replacing at 10 years.
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It is not so easy to top up refillable bottles as it once was, I can only see it getting more difficult. If you decide to go for refillables, I suggest you increae you options for obtaining gas by fitting one calor or equivalent and one refillable. If you fit one of Gaslow's manual change over systems, it comes with a level gauage which I have always found to be pretty accurate. It is easy to see when you need to refill. These days I take every opportunity to fill my two aging 11Kgm refillable bottles. When the time is right to replace the bottles, I will be doing as I suggest above.
peedee
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yeah the carado we have part ex for the auto trail had gaslo yes it was cheap but not so easy to get LPG from stations and was having to detour out of the way to get it when we refilled. Happy to pay the extra for calor for the convenience. Thank you all
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I can honestly say we have never had an issue getting lpg in the uk. I just use the my lpg app to find a site near to where I am going. Obviously not just fuel stations but also eg haulage yards have lpg. More motorhomes dealers have it as well now. I also believe from what I have been told by others that getting an exchange calor cylinder is not always easy.
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It’s swings and roundabouts in UK depending on where you live. We are getting back our LPG converted Jeep this week, we had it done because LPG was so cheap (37p a litre at the time🤩) and there were so many places locally to get it. It’s now much more expensive, and fewer outlets, but we are still ok where we live. We had to do research for using it in other areas though, Cornwall being one area, hence we never converted our MH, still use two cylinders, which again we have had no trouble getting refills. That said, our MH doesn’t gobble gas like more modern ones do with larger fridge freezers.
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