Cylinder contents
What's the best way to check cylinder content levels on a lpg. Seen different techniques but would prefer a gauge if there is one that is recommended. Any ideas
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In 40+ years of vanning with gas cylinders we never did more than slosh it about and feel the weight to get an idea of contents. Is there such a thing as a gauge? If you have 2 cylinders, there’s no need at all to worry.
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I may be alone in this comment - but I wouldn't waste your money on gauges. I've tried a few over the years and none of them have performed as the advertising blurb said they would. I now have two Safefills - I just run one until empty and swap over as @Tinwheeler and @Wildwood say - and then I go and fill the other one up. I now have a rough idea how long each will last under varying degrees of usage and have never been caught out (yet!).
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i agree with the previous posts, as we carry two has bottles and just swap over when one runs out, getting a refill at the first opportunity. This has work for us over nearly 50 yrs and i see no reason to change what I do.
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I know that in France some garages stipulate that you can only refill vehicle LPG tanks. Of course with a Gaslow system as we have, they have no way of knowing that is not what you are doing. Clearly with a removable Safefill they would. A bit like here, not all garages allow filling of removable cylinders. I assume to refill in France or Spain you would need a similar adapter to what we have for the Gaslow. If you rely on Calor, you would have to be sure you have enough for your trip as you cannot exchange them over there.
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If you take a Camping Gaz 907 size with you for emergency use those cylnders are available and exchangeable inside the store at all larger supermarkets in France . Take the correct pigtail adaptor to fit it.
As Steve has said some French fuel stations wil let you refill a freestanding Safefill cylinder, but some won’t.Other than that you can acquire a large French cylinder such as Le Cube and use/ exchange that.
Or stay on sites with EHU and use electricity rather than gas.
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We have one gauge that is built in to the regulator but it's not very accurate, probably as a rough guide between full and one quarter full but then untrustworthy. We hardly use any gas nowadays, in fact we must have one of the last still-using red Calor gas lite bottles, been there for at least four years.
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When we first got our motorhome in Sept 2023, Calor would not allow retailers to sell new cylinders. You could only exchange if you already had a cylinder, and we didn't. If I'd thought about it, we probably could have got a used empty one off eBay, but didn't think of that until afterwards.
So we ended up with a Flogas Gaslight cylinder, as it was the easiest thing that I could get hold of at the time:
One advantage is that you can see how much gas is left, like the Safefill cylinders. It is translucent not transparent, so not always easy to see, but you can shine a torch through to see the gas level, or give it a little tilt and it becomes more obvious as the gas sloshes around. They are also lighter than the metal cylinders.
Disadvantages are that they work out more expensive for the weight of gas, and also you need to get a pigtail with a clip on adapter.
The other approach that I have read about is to weigh the cylinder with a luggage scale. I have not tried it, but in theory should be at least as accurate as any of the expensive gauges that I've seen advertised.
i.e. If you buy a '13 kg' cylinder, it should contain 13 kg of gas. If you weigh it when it is full (new), it will weigh significantly more because of the cylinder, say 25 kg. So you then know that the empty cylinder weighs 12 kg. Anything over that when you later weigh it will be the amount of gas left.
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