Coleman Xtreme Canister – claims usable to -27C/-16F

Thanks David for that.
To be honest, I did not know that hydrocarbons had such a huge coeff of expansion compared to water. Consider me now ‘educated’. One sees a bit more clearly why canisters are marked not to be refilled!

Cheers

Yes, many thanks, David, for explaining it in a way that is easily understood.

Makes me even happier I’ve gone all butane.

But consider me chastened and I will keep it to 110g in the future.

I’ve spent over half my life cleaning up gasoline-contaminated soils and groundwater (plus some other, more exotic chemicals) so I’ve considering hydrocarbon properties a lot, at least the more pragmatic ones.

Gasoline / petrol expands enough that gasoline stations are charged by mass, essentially.  They apply a temperature correction factor based on the temperature of the gasoline delivered by truck.

Retailer customers are charged by volume only, so you get somewhat more mass for your money where  and when the ground is colder (away from the equator and towards late Spring).  Being closer to the refinery can make a difference – I’ve occasionally gotten a load that was distinctly warm to the touch.

One can notice the difference in a vehicle fuel tank as well.  Say you fill up in early Summer, when shallow ground temps in, say, Spokane or New England might be 40F.  So you are buying denser gasoline.  Warm that 15 gallons up to 115F (hot day, in the sun, over hot asphalt) and it will expand to 15.8 gallons.  Your gas tank has some head space in it, for exactly that reason, otherwise you’d nuke your carbon canister when that liquid gasoline expanded into it.  You can squeeze a little more in if you park on a slope with the fill-pipe uphill, but at the risk of it expanding too much.

Or the reverse: I can fill my tank with less-dense ground-temperature gasoline and my fuel gauge drops as the gasoline cools to, say -20F air temperature and shrinks.

…you get somewhat more mass for your money where  and when the ground is warmer… D. Thomas

hmmm, I think you need to check your math on that one….

Ben: Thanks for catching that.  Brain fart.  When and where the ground is colder, you get denser fuel with more energy per gallon.

I’ll go edit my post.