My wife wanted a gas grill. Yesterday, we went to the local Big 'n Large, and bought a shiny Char-Broil "Commercial" model, factory-equipped for propane, along with a natural gas conversion kit. Four hours of assembly later, it's all built and adapted.

Our house had a gas line preinstalled out back. I was having a hell of a time getting the damn thing open (there was an end-cap on the pipe and it was painted shut) so I made my builder send out his plumber.

Plumber-dude managed to get the thing open and then we looked at what it would take to connect the grill. The line from my house is 1/2" with a female connector on the end. The bbq grill has a male "quick connect" connector on the end of its hose, and also came with a quick connect to female 3/8" regular connector (not flared).

According to the manual for the natural gas adapter kit, the grill is all set for 0.5psi gas, which was the residental standard through 1998. After that, some residences have 2 or even 5psi, and if that's you, then you need to get a regulator (not included). The plumber dude agreed that I need to get one. He also said that I should buy a 1/2" nipple, a 1/2"-to-3/8" bell reducer, and a 3/8" nipple.

I called around to various local plumbing supply shops and nobody has NG regulators. That means I'm ordering online and we're cooking in the kitchen.

My questions for the crowd concerns this whole regulator business. How do I easily figure out whether or not I need the regulator? Or, should I just pony up and get one, since it's a safety thing? And then, which kind should I get? PlumbingSupply.com, for example, offers these things both with and without a "vent limit", but without giving any useful advice about which I should choose. (Maxitrol seems to imply that I don't want a vent limiter for an outdoor setup.) Also, is $60 a reasonable amount to pay for one of these things? Seems a bit high.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Regulators don't limit flow, only the downstream pressure. If the line vents, the vent limiter kicks in and reduces the flow. These are now standard on all new bottle fed gas BBQs.

With a bottle fed BBQ it can be a kind of pain. One MUST open the tank and allow the line pressure to rise before opening a burner valve. Otherwise opening the bottle valve into and open burner will cause the vent limiter to kick in and your burners will work but be choked down. This limits the heat that can be generated by well over 1/2.

A vent limiter is most likely a good thing, especially if any of your connection to the house is exposed.

My preference would be to connect the hard outlet to a valve, followed by the vent limiting regulator, followed by the adapter line leading to the BBQ.

Edit: It seems I may have misunderstood the term "vent limiter"

Here is the relevant weber grill faq.

I can't help you with your actual question (gas installations in the UK must by law be done by registered professionals, which, seeing as this is gas we're talking about, I mind much less than the more recent similar restrictions on electrical installations) but I just wanted to say I admire the dexterity with which you deflected, with that remark, the potential for everyone to pile in and say you should have got a charcoal one!

Peter

Not quite, only businesses need to be CORGI registered, DIY'ers just need to be a "competent person", and this is not defined any further.

Get a charcoal grill.

There's actually a rational reason for wanting a gas grill. Namely, it's not really for cooking meat with lots of smoke. Rather, it's for general-purpose cooking of things that generate way too much smoke. We'd rather have that outside.