We have ones with push-button solenoid shutoffs near each exit door (sort-of). The way it works is that once you push the button, gas does not flow until you insert a key and reset them. You hear an audible click when you do this. They do not alarm when they go off - that would be amazingly annoying.

The solenoids are electronic switches, which means that they also go off in the event of a power outage. So if the power is out you cannot have gas. That makes sense, and is a great feature. The only issue there is that every time the power goes off, one needs to use a key to reset the gas for each room. We are small, so it?s not a big deal for us. At bigger places, you would have to have a key plan. Wouldn?t be that difficult, easy enough to do, but it is something you would have to consider. You can leave keys in the locks, but I?m certain that keys would wander.

All of our gas is in our hoods - so you don?t smell gas in the rooms (it goes up the hood). So walking in to a room with a gas smell is not really an option for us, meaning that we don?t mind if the shutoff switch is in the room as opposed to in the hall.

We have a separate locked valve that turns off gas for each room. It?s a ball valve that we can simply turn to close the gas to a given area. It?s locked with a different key, and again, only I have access to that. We don?t use that often, but it is available to us if necessary.

The switches work nice. We have gas in our organic labs, and we simply have that switch off always (I have the only key), and control it that way. When we need to use gas in organic, which does happen, we can do it in a way where we have control of it, making sure solvents are removed prior to lighting a burner. Works fine

Dave

On Sep 18, 2014, at 8:02 AM, Ken Simolo wrote:

> We have one lab that was renovated with an emergency exhaust button at the door. A very nice feature that has never been used in 15 years. Push button shut offs for natural gas plumbing certainly would make me more comfortable with installing natural gas although that would add even more to the renovation costs. With the places that have easily accessible shutoffs in the hallways (manual valve or push button), are they alarmed so that you know someone has shut them off? I can see obvious issues if they are shut off as a prank although I would expect that to be rare. We used to have lots of fire alarms pulled as pranks but that rarely happens now (dye in the glass certainly helps).
>
> Ken

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