If you use propane to power your emergency generator or perhaps your cooking grill, you will have one or more of those 20 pound fuel tanks. How do you know how much propane is inside the tank?
We just happened to have a power outage at our house yesterday due to a severe thunderstorm. It was out for about 5 hours before the electric utility fixed the problem in our neighborhood. It was an excellent test of our backup power systems (I will go into the details in a later post).
I have a small generator shed I built in the backyard, which houses our dual fuel generator. I mainly built this to have a safe, sheltered place to store up to 6 propane tanks.
Now that I have ran the generator for a few hours, how can I tell how much fuel is left in that first tank? It would be really bad to have one or more of these stored and then find out after a hurricane event that you only had 25% left in them.
The solution I have found is to buy one of these propane tank scales, that let you weigh the tank to find out how much is left inside.
This one is particularly cool because the tanks are heavy to lift up, so lifting and looking would be awkward. They have put a little pointer than remembers how much it weighed after you set it back down.
So you hook it up to the tank and lift it only a couple inches off the ground. Set it down and look at the pointer. Nice design, I highly recommend.
