Refillable Gas-It System Means No More Hauling Heavy Gas Cylinders

As we will be living full-time in our motorhome and want to make life as easy and comfortable as possible, we’ve had our eye on a few upgrades and improvements after reading many blogs on existing full-timers experiences. With only 2 weeks to go until our departure, we were under pressure to get all the outstanding jobs completed.

One of those upgrades was to the existing gas supply.

We had two ordinary Calor gas cylinders fitted and having read about the difficulties with incompatible gas cylinders in different countries, we decided to fit a refillable gas system.

This also made sense as we had no external access door into the gas locker and access was awkward through the garage to change the cylinders. It would be crazy to empty half the contents of our garage each time we needed to change a cylinder.

Having looked at the various refillable LPG systems available, we decided on the Gas-It system as it was the cheapest and our pre-departure costs were mounting up! It had also received excellent reviews from existing users.

The guys at Avon Autogas were superb. My main concern had been usual delivery problems to Northern Ireland, but they were able to deliver the entire system for just £15 extra by next day courier so I ordered the following items:

2 x 11kg refillable gas cylinders
1 x filler hose
1 x outside mounted filling nozzle with white cap
1 x connecting hose to connect both cylinders
1 x new combined auto switch over and regulator
2 x pigtails to connect the cylinders to the regulator
1 x hole saw to cut out the hole in side of the motorhome for the filling nozzle

All the above items including delivery to Northern Ireland for the complete kit came to £400 (with a little discount deducted).

The system should be able to be fitted to a motorhome by any competent DIYer. This video from Jay at OurTour should help.

Rather than fitting the Gas-It system myself I decided to use a mobile caravan gas engineer who was able to fit the system in our driveway. At the same time he was able to check the entire motorhome gas system and all the appliances and issue us with a “Gas Safe” certificate.

Thankfully I had ordered a complete replacement system as the gas engineer told me that our existing pigtails were 5 years past their recommended change date and the regulator was already 10 years expired! There were signs of the old regulator starting to gum up.It is recommended that pigtails are changed every 5 years and regulators every 10 years.

A couple of hours later, the system was fully installed after a wrestle with a hole saw! I was able to take the motorhome to the local filling station later and fill both our cylinders for £25. A single replacement Calor gas cylinder costs £26+, so it shouldn’t take long to recoup this investment living in the motorhome full time, especially with winter heating needs.

Luckily I had re=booked the engineer to return the following week to install a SOG kit to the Thetford toilet. Little did I know at the time that his services would be needed again anyway for additional problems. It never rains but it pours!