Does a 15,000 BTU Burner require a larger gas line?
I'm thinking of upgrading my cheap apartment stove to one with more heat. The current stove's hottest burner is around 8000BTU; I'm looking at one which has one 15K BTU and two 9000BTU burners. I'm located in California, USA.
My question is: if I have an apartment gas line which was installed for the old, low-heat stove, am I likely to need a larger pipe going into the kitchen for a hotter stove? Or does a standard apartment stove natural gas line already supply more gas pressure than I can use? And if the answer is "it depends", what diameter am I looking for?
Best Answer
I've got a 6 burner cooktop with a 16k, 3 12k BTU burners, and two smaller burners. My standard household gas line can supply at least 5 of the 6 concurrently without problem (haven't had occasion to use all 6 at once yet). The gas line feeding it is the same size as the rest of the gas lines in my house. Also, according to the installation instructions, the input gas line must be the same diameter or larger than inlet line of the appliance.
Inferring from that, I'd say it is going to be dependent on the inlet size of the stove you select. I don't believe line pressure will be a problem.
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What size line do you need for a gas stove?
Usually the gas line coming into your kitchen will be 1/2-in. black threaded pipe, and the connection to the stove will be either a male (external threads) or female (internal threads) 1/2-in. fitting.Is 15000 BTU burner enough?
For most users, one power burner (12,000 BTUs or higher) is more than adequate\u2014especially when paired with two medium-strength burners and one low burner for simmering. If you do a lot of cooking that requires quick high heat, such as stir-frying or searing, you may want to push the power up.How many BTU is a standard gas range?
This is the key question, right? A home stove has, on average, about 7000 BTUs per burner. Some burners are lower, designed for simmering and low-heat cooking, and may put out 3000 to 5000 BTUs. And there may be one monster burner on a range that goes up to 12,000.understanding proper size gas lines for proper BTU
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Answer 2
I believe that the size of the piping does matter. In Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck Cookbook he tales an interesting tale from the early days of the restaurant. I found the story online (2nd paragraph):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2001/nov/17/weekend.hestonblumenthal
Excerpt from the article:
Traditionally, we have always been told to plunge green vegetables into a large quantity of boiling, heavily salted water, so that the quantity of cold beans added was not enough to bring the water off the boil. The old Fat Duck kitchen was fuelled with gas from a domestic pipe. This meant that we could not, in fact, bring a particularly large quantity of water to the boil. Because of this, we had to cook our green beans in batches of about eight at a time. Any more than this, and the water would come off the boil, leaving the beans more or less to stew and develop a murky brown colour.
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