Standing Pilot Light

Looking at cutting propane usage at our firehouse. currently have a gas water heater with standing pilot light, and a big range with four pilot lights.

Does anyone know how many gallons of propane a standing pilot light will consume in one month/year.

on the net I have seen anywhere from $22 per month to 50cents per year, little bit of differance in the figures there

Thanks, Eric

I heard 500-600 BTU's per hour is pretty standard for the pilot on a range...not sure about the water heater. If you assumed 550 BTU's per hour for each of the five pilots, that works out to about 260 gallons of propane per year.

The fastest payback would probably be swapping the range for one with intermittent ignition.

Thanks Rob that is what I was looking for.

Eric

I'm not sure it's possible that a stove pilot uses that much gas. My big range has five pilots (three for the six burner stovetop, one for each of the two ovens). If they use 500 btu/hour then I should be running about 18.5 therms per month. I cut off the surface ones this summer and left them off, just relit them this week. I use gas for the stove and for hot water (comes off my electric ignition combi boiler). My gas usage was actually slightly higher this summer (close to 30 CCF per month) than it was last summer (about 25ccf per month), when all the pilots were lit. I feel like we did less cooking this summer and I know we were away much more often too. The pilots certainly use some gas; they make the top of the stove quite hot to the touch, but since having them lit or not seems to make no difference to my consumption I'm guessing it must be quite low. That said, if I was on propane or if natural gas was substantially higher in price, I would just leave the stovetop pilots off and light with a match. Easy enough.

Rob R. wrote:for each of the five pilots, that works out to about 260 gallons of propane per year.

I think I was told 75 gallons a year for an oven pilot. That's in the same ballpark as Rob's numbers. Surprising, isn't it?

Looked around quite a bit. This was the closest I found to giving the answer in plain ordinary English. Most of them gave a range of 500-1200 and I couldn't figure out why such a big variation? Now I know.... this usage is for one standing pilot. this is based on LP rather than propane but you get the idea.

How much gas does a standing pilot use?
Again, this goes back to the design of the burner. A thermocouple system uses about 700 BTU's per hour while a thermopile system about 1500 btu's. I find it easier to understand volume in gallons; a gallon of LP gas contains roughly 91,500 btu's. A thermopile assisted burner therefore uses one gallon of gas in 61 hours, or nearly 12 gallons a month. A thermocouple system would be roughly half that amount.

At time of this writing (September 2010), some of the manufacturers we deal with are making electronic ignition systems available as an upgrade option at a higher cost while some have made a permanent switch to electronic ignition systems. While this has added about $100 to the cost of the appliance, a homeowner using LP gas would realize a complete cost payback in 3-4 months of use through the reduction in gas use.