I was mulling over the idea of possibly putting our kitchen and 2 bathrooms onto a gas geyser, I had one before at our previous house, they work well but the only issue is that when the gas bottle runs out mid shower in winter it’s pretty unpleasant, this got me wondering if there are automatic LPG change over swithches which as it turns out there are but seems they are not readily available in SA.
It would be fantastic to have the bottle change over automatically and then trigger an automation in HA letting us know that we have an empty gas bottle.
Has anyone used these?
Surprised that they aren’t more popular and readily available than they are or am I missing something?
Hi Paul, What a nice idea, I would like one as well. I can only see one problem with this. Like it is now, I at least know when the cylinder is empty and have some time to fill it up while the second cylinder is in use. When the auto changeover doing its work in my case, I would not realise that the first one is empty and most probably run the second one empty 20H00 on a Saturday evening and either have to pay elevated prices for a refill or wait for Monday to refill at my prefered depot.
My head gets so busy that I don’t think about these things until my wife tells me that she cant make coffee because the gas is finished.
Yup thats my concern which is why I said I’d look to integrate with Home Assistant and have an automation trigger when one of the bottles is below xxkg for xxdays and I’d then know the auto change over had occured.
The valve does have a visual (red) indicator when the auto change over has occured but for most use cases this wouldn’t really help.
My thinking is to have 3 bottles, 2 connected and when the auto change over happens I get a notification and then replace the empty with the spare and order its replacement.
Rule number one with gas bottles, thou shall always have a spare.
A friend have a business selling gas bottles, I asked him about it again this past weekend because sometime back I saw a add of some gadget which can measure gas bottle levels and send it to a phone app.
He said with the big 9kg plus bottles there is only one way and that’s the manual way, weigh it.
These apparently work quite well my only concern with using them is that I forget them under the bottle when the gas guys take the bottle away which could get costly They’re about R950 locally.
There is also an integration for them with Home Assistant.
I’m probably still leaning towards an ESPHome pressure mat setup to let me know when the bottle is empty.
Yeah saw those and were the local ones at R950 I was referring to, they’re rebranded Mopeka’s.
I’m gonna give one a try, nice that there is an HA integration for them, will try find the auto changer over locally but if not will bite the bullet and import it.
I had a leak. In the kitchen of all places. For weeks, my wife was convinced we have a mouse in the house. Well, at one point we did, but we got rid of it. With a broom. At 3AM. In the bloodiest manner possible. But the smell remained. Turns out it’s the gas we were smelling, not mouse pee. I don’t know if the smell is similar, of we just managed to convince ourselves that it is.
In any case, one bottle ran empty. I figured, hey… it was probably time. Switched over to the “hot” spare. It was empty in under a week. Due to the leak. Normally a bottle lasts months (only used for cooking), so there was no spare… I had to refill two bottles. At the same time.
Not long after, one of the hoses developed a crack. Thankfully on the “hot spare”, while it was closed. I discovered it on changeover, and could work around it by physically swapping the bottle to the healthy connector. Again, had that happened slightly differently, there would have been no spare.
So, the above is probably good advice. But I’m probably still not going to do it, because… then I need to stash that extra bottle somewhere. And I already have a bunch of 9kgs standing around (too short to reach the connections, so no good as backup), and the last thing I want is to look like a gas depot
At least Myth Busters showed us that the concentration you need to really be dangerous is quite high, and my kitchen is WAY too leaky in air terms for there to be any danger of fire. But yes, there is a reason they make gas smelly, and we kinda ignored that because we thought it was something else. That’s a bit of a fail
Regulations state you are not allowed to store more than 100kg of LPG on your property, so a couple of 9kg bottles is fine. Having a portible 9kg on a heater or braai is a big no no if you already have 2x 48kg elsewhere on say a stove or geyser.
I have a 9kg on a braai under the lapa, a 9kg in my rental chalet on the gas hob and a 18kg on the gas oven in the house, then a full 9kg spare in the garage and I actually still have a empty 18kg bottle as well.
Oh wow. When we moved in here, we had two 48kg bottles. After we moved the hot water OFF the gas, I downgraded the bottles to 19kg units. Easier to transport, last long enough.
So technically I now have some room for a “backup”. But I’m still not going to do it… hehehe
I would go for the mechanical option you posted, and then use a ESP32 with two magnetic switches to detect the position of a magnet mounted on the changeover lever. A switch like this will work perfectly:
Thats a nice idea the only issue though is that the manual change over switch doesn’t move when the automatic change over valve has kicked in, there is only a visual indicator that goes red when the change over has happened which is why I’ve been looking at the weighing or Mopeka options.
I’ve ordered 2 Mopeka’s which arrive today, I came across an ESPHome Mopeka BLE integration which I’ll then use as a sort of bluetooth to wireless bridge and pull the data into Home Assistant as relying on the app and close bluetooth proximity isn’t exactly first prize for me, will share my findings once I’ve played around with them.
