Calculating Business Risks

Posted on: 22 August 2019

Propane is inexpensive and clean-burning, which makes it a great fuel for your food truck's cooking equipment. However, it's important to take the right safety precautions whenever you're working with propane—propane leaks can quickly cause flash fires. To help keep you, your cooking crew and your customers safe, here are four tips for using your food truck's propane system in the correct manner.

1. Make Sure You and Your Staff Know the Signs of a Propane Leak

Everyone who works on your food truck needs to be able to recognize signs of a potential propane leak. The most obvious sign of a leak is the smell—propane companies add a component to the propane that has a distinctive sulfurous smell like rotten eggs.

Propane gas delivery companies can provide you with a card that has a small amount of this additive sprayed onto it, allowing you and your kitchen crew to know with certainty what it smells like. If you smell it, immediately turn off all of your equipment and call your propane company.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to smell a propane leak when you're cooking—all of the pungent cooking odors can mask the smell of the additives. It's a good idea to install a propane gas detector on the interior of your food truck near where the propane hoses enter, as it will sound an alarm whenever it detects propane vapor in the air.

2. Inspect Your Propane Equipment Before You Begin Cooking

Whether you've mounted your propane tanks on the back of your food truck or underneath the chassis, they're susceptible to wear and tear while you're driving around. Before you start cooking for the day, you need to inspect them carefully.

Bumps in the roads can cause the connections to loosen and small stones kicked up by your tires can puncture the hoses. Ensure that the regulator is securely attached to the tank and that your hoses are intact.

3. Pay Attention to the Color of Your Burner Flames

The flames coming out of your propane burners can tell you about potential problems in your system. Propane gas should always burn blue. If you notice yellow or red flames coming from the burners in your food truck, it means that combustion is incomplete. This is a problem because incomplete combustion produces carbon monoxide, which can pose a danger to you and your kitchen staff.

There are a few potential causes of incomplete combustion. Your equipment may have a layer of soot on top of it, which prevents full combustion. In this case, your burners need to be cleaned. Your hoses or the orifice where propane gas enters your burners may have contaminants in them or may be partially obstructed, which causes them to burn with the incorrect mixture of air and propane. Your propane gas itself may even be contaminated, although this is rare.

If cleaning your kitchen equipment and making sure all the hoses are free of obstruction doesn't fix the problem, call your propane gas delivery service and have a technician inspect your food truck's propane system.

4. Don't Run Out of Propane

Finally, you should always have enough propane to last you throughout the day—make sure you always top up before participating in an event such as a food festival where you expect numerous customers. When you run out of propane, your pilot lights will be extinguished, and you'll need to have the system fully inspected for leaks before you can have it recharged with propane.

In this case, checking for leaks means checking to make sure the propane system is entirely closed before the technician refills your tanks with propane. If a burner was accidentally left open by one of your team and the technician started refilling your tanks, you'd immediately start leaking propane—this would create an incredibly dangerous situation when someone tried to light the pilot light.

It's better to avoid the inspection, the service fee, and the potential risks altogether by making sure the propane tanks on your food truck never dip dangerously low. If you're running out, call a propane gas delivery service and close up shop until it can be recharged. When this happens frequently, you may want to purchase an additional propane tank for your food truck.

In order to safely use propane, just keep in mind that you need to monitor for leaks and inspect your equipment regularly. Always use tanks that are in their qualification period in order to avoid using old tanks that are more prone to leaks. Above all, call your propane gas delivery service if you ever think that there's a problem with your food truck's propane system rather than continuing to use it.