I do work for a couple who are weightlifting champs and personal trainers. More money in that than I thought. Anyway they have a couple of the portable propane heaters they use when they're entertaining groups of clients in their backyard.

The pilot lights on these things are hellaciously hard to light and they use them so rarely they turn off the gas between uses so you have to relight the pilot every time. The guy is no dummie and he can't light it half the time. It gives me fits, in spite of my well known technical brilliance. You can't light the main burner w/o the pilot being lit - opens the orifice I believe.

They have an outdoor NG range - a large broiler, it's in a marble tiled kitchen counter setup in their backyard. They've had trouble with the regulator twice so he asked me if we couldn't just do away with it go straight from the gas line, which is already regulated to some extent at the meter anyway, to the burner.

If it was indoor, no way would I have done it, I don't want any dead clients and their 4 year old daughter is possibly the sweetest child in the world. But it's outdoors so I did it and it works fine. Gives them the flame height they wanted but not too high, and the regulators were giving them a tiny flame.

So we're wondering, why not try to get rid of the pilot light inside the propane heaters and just light the main burner with one of those long BBQ lighters? Probably won't be as easy as the outdoor range was to simplify but I'm willing to get into it. Might need some kind of regulator to keep the propane pressure at the right level. Then again, I think there's one on the line where it attaches to the tank.

Anybody done anything like it?

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