The ABCs of auto tourism: only propane for winter trips!
The most commonly installed heating system in trailers and campers is the gas version of Truma. In some versions it only heats the room, in others it is capable of additionally heating water in a special boiler. Each of these activities uses gas, which is most often supplied in 11 kg gas cylinders.
There are no problems with them in the summer season. The first best item will replace the cylinder with a full one containing a mixture of two gases: propane and butane, for about 40-60 zlotys. Just plug it in and you can enjoy your heating or stove running.
The situation is completely different in the winter season, when sub-zero temperatures surprise no one. How does the structure of this mixture change in the bottle?
When the cylinder contains a mixture of propane and butane, the situation is more complicated. When gas is consumed, propane evaporates in greater quantities than butane, and the proportions of these gases in the mixture change. In this case, the proportions of propane and butane in the liquid phase change differently in the gas phase. Here, the pressure in the reservoir no longer remains constant, since each gas has a different boiling pressure, and when their proportions in the mixture change, the resulting pressure of the mixture also changes. When only the rest of the mixture remains in the cylinder, you can be sure that there is much more butane than propane. Butane evaporates at a temperature of +0,5°C, so sometimes it may turn out that although something “squishes” in the cylinder, the gas does not come out. This is butane left in a cylinder on a cold winter day. It failed to evaporate because the ambient temperature is lower than the boiling point of butane and there is nowhere to get the thermal energy necessary for evaporation, the portal writes.
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The effect in a touring car is easy to predict. Truma “throws out” an error, suggesting that we have problems with gas from the cylinder and at the same time turns off the heating. A few tens of minutes later we wake up in complete cold, the temperature in the camper is about 5-7 degrees, and outside the frost is -5 degrees. Unpleasant situation, isn't it? And this is extremely dangerous when traveling, for example with children.
How to protect yourself? Buy a tank of pure propane. Its cost is usually slightly higher (about 5 zlotys) than that of a propane-butane mixture. Then we can be sure that the heating will work without problems even in the coldest weather (we were able to test the camper at minus 17 degrees). The gas in the 11 kg cylinder will be completely used up, and when the system tells you to replace it, we are sure that it will be completely used up.
Where can I buy such a cylinder? There is a problem here: on the map of Poland there are still few points offering cylinders filled with pure propane. It’s worth picking up the phone and calling the nearest distribution points. For example: in Wroclaw only at the eighth point we managed to find such cylinders.
PS. Remember that on average one 11-kilogram cylinder is enough for two days of continuous heating. Availability is a must!
