Gas Lines for Dummy Installers

residential gas manifold

In our never-ending search for more stupidification of the internet, we regularly run across content farm posts written by people who have only the vaguest, most tangential familiarity with the subject. The posts that claim to be instructions, posted by "professional writers" who have little or no knowledge of the topic, are among the worst. We are reasonably sure that eHow's J. Lang Wood has cooked on a gas stove and benefited from gas water heaters and gas furnaces, but does she know anything about "Installing Natural Gas Lines Into a House"?¹ Based on her HomeSteady.com post, we doubt it...

Wood opened, as DMS² demanded, with an introduction in which she extolled the virtues of natural gas for "home heating and cooking" – as opposed to propane, anyway: no mention of heating oil, solar, electricity. Do many people heat their home with propane? But we digress. Once she gets the intro out of the way, Lang got down to business. Her instructions?

• "...Locate [and] turn off the valve that controls the flow of the gas."
• "Remove the pipe cap on the end of the gas line..."
• "Apply an even layer of pipe joint compound to the male ends of the pipe and connect with a wrench, tightening securely but not too much, using one wrench on each side of the connecting pipes."
• "...replace the cap on the end of the supply pipe and turn the gas back on."

We'd like to be able to say that Wood posted basically correct instructions for extending a gas line, but she flunked even that test. She flunked because she doesn't even seem to know that there is no female end of a black iron pipe; all of the connections must be made with fittings.

Lang also sid nothing whatsoever about branches, going around corners, connecting to an appliance, or adding shutoff valves at appliances. She disn't mention using those nifty yellow flexible gas lines, either. That's probably because her basis for her article was a couple of bloggers' amateur DIY websites instead of an established, authoritative website such as Family Handyman or Ron Hazelton. Heck, she didn't even pretend to look it up in a book, like so many eHowians do! Wood's instructions are both incomplete and incorrect, or at best ambiguous. When it comes to working with natural gas, none of those three words should describe the instructions. That's why J. Lang is our Dumbass of the Day... again.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/info_12186180_installing-natural-gas-line-house.html
² DMS = Demand Media Studios, the former name of Leaf Group

copyright © 2018-2023 scmrak

DDIY - APPLIANCES