Propane tank safety in winter storms

Written by Texas Star Propane

Propane tank safety in winter storms comes down to one number: get your tank above half before the end of November and keep it there. Once a hard freeze is in the forecast for this part of Texas the phones do not stop and the roads do not always stay open, and the people who called in October are the ones already taken care of.

We all remember what a real freeze does here. Routes stop running, the power goes, and a tank that looked fine on Monday is a problem by Thursday. None of that is fixable during the storm. All of it is easy before one.

Why you do this in November and not in January

Two reasons, and neither is us trying to rush you.

The schedule genuinely fills

When a freeze is forecast, every customer on will call phones the same morning. We run routes by area, so we can cover a lot of ground, but we cannot be everywhere at once. A tank topped up in November is a truck we can send somewhere else in January.

Roads close, and that is outside anybody’s control

Ice on the back roads out past Anderson and Navasota stops a loaded bobtail. We will not put a driver on a road that is not safe, and no amount of notice changes that once it has happened. The National Weather Service publishes the watches and warnings worth acting on.

Your freeze checklist

Nine things, and most of them take a few minutes.

• Get the tank above half, and keep it there through February. Half is the working floor, not a quarter.
• Read the gauge now and write the date down, so you know your own burn rate before the cold arrives.
• Clear the path from the driveway to the tank, including anything parked or stacked in front of it.
• Find your tank shutoff valve and make sure you can turn it, in daylight, before you ever need it.
• Check that the regulator vent is pointing down and is not blocked by anything.
• Test every carbon monoxide alarm in the house and change the batteries.
• Make sure your appliances are vented clear, and never run a grill, a generator or a patio heater indoors.
• If you have a standby generator, run it once now rather than finding out during the outage.
• Save our number in your phone, so you are not looking it up by flashlight.

What a hard freeze actually does to your tank

This is the part most people here have never been told, and it is the reason half a tank is the number rather than a quarter.

A low tank delivers gas more slowly in deep cold

Propane sits in the tank as a liquid and has to turn to vapor before it reaches your appliances. The colder it gets, the harder that is, and the less liquid there is in the tank the less surface there is for it to happen from. So a tank at 20 percent in a hard freeze can struggle to feed a furnace that it would run without complaint in October.

That is not a fault and nothing is broken. It is physics, it affects every propane tank in Texas the same way, and the fix is simply keeping more liquid in the tank through the winter.

Why the regulator vent matters more than people think

The regulator steps tank pressure down to something your appliances can use, and it has a small vent that has to stay clear. Ice, a wasp nest, or something stacked against the tank can block it. A blocked vent in a freeze is one of the few things that turns a cold week into no heat at all, and it takes ten seconds to look at.

What we handle, and what you handle

Job	Who does it	When
Filling the tank	We do	Before the end of November, then as needed
Reading the gauge	You do	Monthly through winter
Clearing the path to the tank	You do	Before every delivery
Anything on the regulator or the line	We do	Call us, never a homeowner job
Relighting a pilot	Either	You if you are confident, us if you are not
Leak check after a runout	We do	Required by law before gas goes back on
Testing carbon monoxide alarms	You do	Now, and twice a year

The dividing line is simple. Anything that involves opening a gas connection is ours. Looking, clearing and testing is yours.

What happens if you wait

If the tank runs dry during a freeze, three things happen at once. You have no heat. You cannot simply be refilled, because the line has lost pressure and a technician has to run a leak check before anything is relit. And the roads that would bring that technician to you are the reason you ran out.

That is a scheduled service call in the worst week of the year, and it is the single most avoidable problem in this business. The steps if it does happen are in what to do if you run out of propane, and how deliveries get scheduled is in our guide to how propane delivery works.