In an RV, if you don’t have an LPG Refillable Gas Cylinder, it can be messy to handle all the different cylinder connection types. Even in Europe, the connections in Italy, France, and Germany are different and not compatible.
Before leaving Italy, we made sure to leave the country with 2 cylinders full.
A couple of days later, we started to feel the smell of gas inside our RV. It wasn’t strong and neither had the leaking gas sensor detected anything. As the days passed, the smell got stronger and I had to check it again, but this time I could hear the hiss. Don’t panic!
Ok, ok…so what to do with a leaking bottle? I immediately put it out of the car, 1% safer.
The first thing that came to my mind was to visit a store that sells gas equipment to ask for information, so we went to a famous chain in Germany called OBI, but, unfortunately, they couldn’t assist us. They said:
“Sorry, we cannot do anything for you, and we have no idea on how you can handle the situation. You cannot throw it way full, maybe you should get back to Italy and get it fixed”.
It seemed like a joke to me; I laughed inside. Driving 400km from Nuremberg to Italy, with a leaking cylinder in the car was out of question.
I was determined to find a solution and even considered just abandoning the bottle somewhere far far away from residential areas, wishing that after a couple of days, the bottle would be empty. Seriously!
While driving, trying to figure out a place to dispose of the cylinder, we came across a fire station, and I had the brilliant idea of asking for information.
The firefighter crew was cleaning their cars on the patio, but they stopped everything they were doing to help us. Even though they didn’t speak English, one of them could understand us, spoke a little bit of English, and the rest tried google translator and body language. They said, “Well, we can empty the bottle and you’re done.”
They went inside, and after a couple of minutes they were all in theirs suites inside the car outside flashing lights, ready to act in the complicated situation
It took almost 2 hours for them to solve the situation.
Gas out, bottle empty, danger was over. Such a relief! Before we hit the road again, the Firefigther Master came and said: Look, this is not for free, we will need your passport and an invoice will get to your home 😫.
So far we are still waiting the invoice to arrive. I’m pretty sure that it won’t be cheap, but anyway, I’m happy that we did the right thing and nothing serious happened with us or anyone else.
How much do you think it’s gonna be? Any guess?
Well, on the following day we bought a new and German bottle, the right connector l, and we luckily had a spare regulator (yeah, attention, check if the pressure is compatible with your equipment ).
Ended up that that Italian cylinder was the most expensive ever, and poor us that all we wanted was to save money by not changing the connectors. 😂
