Put a tray under it and open and shut it real fast. If water comes out, it’s a water line. If you hear hissing and smell rotten eggs, it’s a gas line. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Chances are you’re not gonna blow yourself up with a fraction of a second’s worth of gas leaking out, but for legal reasons this comment is a joke.)
good luck if you break it
If it opens but not closing anymore you have a problem. This can happen with old valves.
If that happens, shut off the main and open the windows.
Well it’s capped off too, so first you’ll need to take that out.
Is it copper? Then it is water.
Is it cast iron? Then it is gas.
If it is plastic, what color is it? Blue, cold water. Red, hot water. Yellow, gas. Orange, not for you to play with. Clear, white, grey? Fuck that guy who did that.
What’s orange?
Radiant heating.
Danger
Not cast iron, it’s rolled steel but the trade name is black iron pipe. Cast iron is used only in drainage.
TIL gas dryers exist
Very common in the U.S. we have been marketed to for almost 100 years about gas appliances being better than electric. The common phrase “now you’re cooking with gas!” Started as an ad on radio shows like Maxwell Coffee Hour, Jack Benny, Chase and Sanborn, Johnson Wax, and Bob Hope around 1940. Now it just means you’re working hard/well, especially suddenly.
Huh, always heard the phrase as “cooking with fire”
The firewood industry is slippery, haha.
They are so much better at drying than electric dryers. The gas heater dries out the air better so dries the clothes quicker. Electric just seems to make the clothes hot, but more humid. Depending on time of year and other factors they swing from a lot cheaper to operate, to eat more expensive. Not sure about the environmental impact of them though.
Oh I don’t doubt it. Gas stoves are pretty common in the UK and much quicker at getting up to heat than most electric. However, the last 10 or so places I’ve lived around Eurooe haven’t even had gas connections, so I’m not sure its that common over here.
If it’s in your laundry area and you already know which ones are the water lines, there’s a good chance it’s the gas line. I’d try following it back to the source to see if it connects to the gas line, if you can.
Also, you should know that there’s a difference between natural gas and liquefied propane or LP. They burn differently, and there will be major issues if you hook an appliance configured for LP up to natural gas and vice versa.
You’ll know you have LP if you have a tank nearby, and if so you will probably need to modify the dryer for it. The installers should be able to do this for you for an extra fee. Natural gas is usually delivered by pipes in the ground, and most dryers are set up for that from the factory.
did not know the difference between gas and LP, thanks for this!!
most dryers
All dryers.
For near enough to every single model not to matter the LP conversion kit is sold separately, also. For Whirlpool and their subsidiaries (Maytag) in particular, their LP kit lineup recently changed just to make matters more confusing, and probably not all retailers are up to date on which model requires which kit. So have fun with that.
TL;DR: Your life will be much easier if your house is served by natural gas rather than propane.
I wasn’t sure so I didn’t want to make a definitive statement, so thanks for the confirmation.
Though I will say that I recently bought an LG gas dryer and converting it to propane just involved a new gas nozzle and turning a screw.
No prob. You were on the right track.
One of my duties in life is maintaining a major appliance e-commerce web site with ~14,500 SKU’s. So I might know a thing… or two… about appliances.
As someone who’s probably ordered the wrong part and then the right part from your site about a dozen times: Thank you for your service o7
That does indeed look like a gas line with shutoff valve.
It almost certainly is a gas line.
Also, if your dryer were electric, the vast majority of full size residential dryers in the US are 240 volt machines and require a dedicated 240 volt, 30 amp NEMA 10-30 or 14-30 outlet on its own circuit, which has a socket face on it about the size of a baseball and is pretty tough to miss. If you don’t have one of those in your laundry area, you ain’t installing an electric dryer regardless.
