Fireplace installation, part 2: Service and house gas lines
When we bought our propane fireplace last month, we didn't have propane plumbed on our property or in our house. So we knew we had some work to do. It started with digging for the buried service line.
A few weeks later, we're ready for our first round of inspections. Both the service line and the one I installed into our living room are holding pressure.
I cranked the house line up to 10 psi. A little overkill since propane is über-low pressure, around 0.5 psi. If the line can hold ten it should pass inspection. Should, given the rest of the work I did whilst learning on the job.
Rewinding a bit, as most projects do, running a gas line into our house hit a snag right out of the gate.
Namely, a giant metal duct in the garage. I cut out a sizable chunk of drywall to make this discovery. Hoping to access the underside of our living room floor from the garage, the duct meant I had to come up with Plan B. That meant going in from above, through the floor. Which meant pulling up a bunch of tongue-and-groove bamboo flooring. Not my idea of fun.
Thankfully, I've done it before when probing our bedroom floor for a joist on which to mount our floating wall. It's just not much fun. Proceeding as gingerly as possible, I still broke a few tongues. Nothing a little wood glue couldn't fix, however. With enough subfloor exposed, I could finally get to work planning the very short gas line from where Ag Supply roughed in their service line.
Speaking of Ag Supply, the guy was nice when he showed up with two tank options: a horizontal and a vertical. Both the same volume, we ended up going with a horizontal because it looked smaller and tucked nicely behind our neighbor's fence.
It took him no time at all to drop 40' of CSST tubing in the hole I dug. Then it was up to me to figure out the rest.
Which brings me back to the subfloor. I cut a hole big enough to get some power tools underneath and got to work. It really wasn't difficult. Just one step after another. The first one: drill a hole through the floor joist and the concrete siding.
After a lot of research and some scare tactics from the manufacturers, I opted to pick up a bunch of Home-Flex CSST materials from Home Depot. Like PEX, CSST just seemed so much simpler to install despite all the warnings and supposed requirements for being a licensed installer to touch the stuff. Following all the steps the installation instructions provide, it really is straightforward.
Lots of measuring and then making the connections.
In short order, the line was installed on the exterior of our house.
What I knew going into this thanks to K and her Facebook sleuthing was that there were in fact two floors in our living room. These are photos she found of the construction process on the architect's page.
The second photo shows the original flooring-slash-foundation. The part in the photo with the roofline was a dining room or something. The part in the foreground, lower than the other room, was an outside deck. The first photo shows the new framing. Basically, they laid 2x8 floor joists on top of the old deck floor. That was key because I knew ahead of time how much room I had to work with and what to expect when I cut that hole in our subfloor.
With the line roughed-in and access to the wall, I took the liberty of doing some additional work: wiring a recessed floor outlet for the fireplace and organizing our audio/video cabling. We also are painting the wall behind where the fireplace will go before we heave it into place.
Once that was complete, I was able to finish up the identical steps of attaching a flange and 3/8" flare shutoff on the flooring of our living room. It's tucked discreetly behind the side of the fireplace we won't ever really see. Worth noting: I used blue thread tape on the NPT threads of the Home-Flex flange fitting.
The last step was to bond the CSST line on the exterior of our house. Since the Jøtul is powered for the blower and accent lighting, our gas line needs to be grounded. I got a 15' run of 6-gauge copper wire and the requisite connections to secure it to our service grounding rod and the exterior CSST fitting.
With that, we now have propane service in our house. Well, not officially. Once the inspector signs off on these steps, we get to at last move the Jøtul into place, cut a bigger hole in our house for the venting, and fire it up.
