I've got a water heater and a hot water radiator furnace sitting next to each other, both on gas. The strange thing is that there are two parallel gas lines feeding each one of these which come from across the basement but branch off from the same gas line. Why was there a need for two lines? Cant they "tee" at the last moment right before the appliances?
I've seen a lot of strange, stupid and crazy things in my house so it wouldn't surprise me if this is one of them. But before I combine the lines I'd like to get some feedback from people. What does the code say about this?
Edit: I should have added this detail in my original questions but all my pipes are 3/4" including the shared pipe before the "T". Basically there's one 3/4 pipe that goes out of the meter (I have the gas meter in the basement) and there are 4 branches (each is 3/4 as well) out of that. But two of those run in parallel across the whole basement. I think it's insane.
Best Answer
The concern that I know of is about the size of the pipe and all appliances that can be running at the other end. So if they ran out of a larger dimension pipe (or just had a lot of the smaller dimension) this would almost make sense. But I'd think any normal installer would try to minimize the parts cost and split it closer to the appliances.
However, if the second appliance was added later, the existing line may have been too small, and then it would be cheaper to run a separate small line rather than replace the existing one with a new large line.