How do you heat your home? If you use filtered propane fuel, you are in good company. Families around the United States rely on this clean and versatile fuel to heat their homes and cook their food.

If you rely on propane and propane accessories to heat your home, you should take some precautions to be safe. Filtered propane is a gas at normal room temperature but it is transported as a liquid. It has no taste, smell or color and is often mixed with something that has a bad smell to alert people to leaks in the filtered propane tanks.

Tips to Stay Safe When Using Propane to Heat Your Home:

1. Keep the area around the heating element clear. You need to keep anything that may be able to catch on fire at least three feet away from any heating appliances. These can include your fireplaces, space heaters or furnaces. If you are not sure if something is flammable, keep it away from the heating source just to be on the safe side.
2. Keep kids and pets away from the heating unit. The same distance of three feet should be clear of kids and pets. For all of the appliances that you are keeping flammable items away from, need to do what you can to keep children and animals away from as well. You may want to look into putting up a physical barrier if cannot keep the pets and children away any other way. If it uses clean burning, filtered propane, animals and kids should stay away from it.
3. Keep your smoke alarms and carbon monoxide monitors working. About once a month, you should check your smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors. You should be careful about changing the batteries in these devices as often as needed.
4. Be careful about your power usage. For appliances that use electricity in addition to the filtered propane, you should only plug them into outlets that have no other similar appliances plugged in. You should also make sure you know which circuit it will be drawing power from so that you do not overload that circuit.
5. Turn off your filtered propane appliances when no one is around. When you leave the house or go to bed, you should make sure your space heater or fireplace is turned off. If your furnace runs on propane, it can be left on when you are asleep.
6. Follow the instructions.There is a reason the manufacturer of the propane heating appliances includes a manual, you should read it and follow any and all instructions it contains. You and your family will be safer when you do this.
7. Have professionals do the installation. You do not need this with portable heaters that use filtered propane but fireplaces, furnaces, water heaters all need to be put in by a qualified, professional propane services company. They should know all of the local codes and can do the installation safely and properly.
8. Have your appliances inspected regularly. Every year, you need to have your heating appliances and your chimney inspected by a trained and qualified professional service. They can often find problems when they are small so that they do not grow into large ones that are hard and expensive to repair.

When you are heating your home with filtered propane, you should feel good knowing you are using a resource that is produced in the United States. More than 90% of the propane that is used across the United States is produced inside the country. Most of the 10% that comes from other countries is imported from Canada and Mexico. At least 70% of imported propane fuel comes from these nations.

It is also a very environmentally friendly and cost effective fuel. In terms of its environmental impact, scientists have found that using more propane than conventional fuels can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Some have suggested that using it in cars and trucks can lower the vehicle’s emissions by as much as 10%.

At the end of the day, using filtered propane to heat your home and cook your food is a really great option. It is a safe, versatile, environmentally friendly and cost effective fuel to use.

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