How come the fire from the stove go back down into the gas tank/gas pipes?
In: 2
I assume you mean why *doesn’t* the fire go back down the gas pipes (because it definitely doesn’t).
There’s no oxygen in the gas pipes. The fire can only exist where there’s both gas and oxygen. The gas mixes with the oxygen in the burner after it exits the pipe. The pressure in the gas line is higher than air pressure, so the air doesn’t go into the gas line.
Without oxygen, there’s no fire, so nothing happens inside the line.
It isn’t really going down in the pipes it is just burning the last bit of gas out of the pipes after you’ve turned the knob off.
Think of it like a water hose. The pressure pushes it out.
And fire needs oxygen to burn.
In addition to the good answers, there’s another factor that’s interesting:
You may have noticed that when you first hold the button down and it ignites, if you immediately let go out will go out, and so you need to hold it in for a few seconds first? This is a safety mechanism wherein the flow of gas actually requires either the button being held down or a certain temperature to maintain – so those few seconds are basically waiting for that temperature to be achieved.
The reason for this is so that if something were to cause the flame to go out but no one was around to notice, the gas would essentially “turn itself off” in just a handful of seconds. Without this, gas would be pissing into the room until someone noticed, creating a huge risk of a very bad time.
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