Jumpin' Jack Flash
We use quite a lot of bottled gas - specifically butane - and I think we're more or less legal. The original bottles came with a contract, rather than from some car boot sale, and we have the installation tested every five years. Were it all to explode—and an alarming number of collapsing buildings are attributed to gas explosions each year —the insurance companies might just pay out. That is, provided we didn't die in a hailstorm of shards of severed metal. When I think about it that's probably more likely than an insurance company actually paying out. I always hope that the reason there are so many explosions is not that bottled gas is inherently dangerous, but that people are a bit gung ho about it. They buy the bottles secondhand somewhere to avoid the regular checks, don’t worry about the “sell by” dates on the rubber hoses, never replace the valves or worry about their pressure ratings and even tape things together with duct tape. We use gas for the water heater and f...