General Tools Natural Gas Detector, Leak Sniffer Pen PNG2000A,Gray

I've been in the heating trade for 35 years now & have seen a lot of examples of "tradeline" gas leak detectors. There were always the gas utility testers that were also far too expensive to purchase & keep calibrated; the first break from that that I recall was the Tif8800, which was reasonably priced and calibrated in the field. Setting aside the sucky nature of its rechargeable batteries, if calibrated by its instructions it was wildly oversensitive & could literally be tripped by breathing into the sensor. Last time I checked, I wasn't exhaling methane.Fast forward to my recent need for a leak detector, I decided to get a couple of different "current tradeline" options, and a couple of cheap Amazon alternatives. One of them totally sucked (it mimicked the tif8800, unsurprisingly). This is the other one - within a day, I found 3 gas leaks that I did not smell (all of which were trivially corrected). Within a week I had found 6 total. I recommended to my boss that they get one of these for every field worker, and I suspect it'll happen because of the price.This is not an LEL detector, far from it. We don't carry LEL detectors, can't afford the price of admission. If you've got a gas smell, we're going to use soap bubbles to prove a leak, or use one of the tradeline options out there for sniffers. One, the UEI100 being an example that I bought, uses field calibration like the Tif8800, but is much improved in that it's less prone to false positives & its rechargeability appears to be vastly improved. The other style can be exemplified by the Klein (which I also bought) which is not adjustable like the UEI, but has a high & low sensitivity setting & has never shown a propensity for false alarms.This is like the latter style, set on low sensitivity. No false alarms, and it detects leaks you can't smell. Not the right instrument if you're dealing with a person who is hypersensitive to ethyl mercaptan (the natural gas odorant in our area - they're different, check with your gas utilities) - you'll want either one of those "false-alarm-capable" sniffers, or getting the gas utility involved. But for the field worker, this thing is genius! It weighs nothing & fits into a pocket that I wasn't already using on my toolbag.Five stars just for the form-factor, and the fact that it doesn't suck.

I’m an HVAC tech. This time of year we start focusing on heat which means a lot of natural gas furnaces but all year round, to a lesser degree, we interact with natural gas (water heaters, gas logs, gas lines for remodels & new construction, even the gas to the furnace assuming the customer’s gas is still on). But this time of year there are a lot of heat maintenances (preventative maintenance visits) and heat related service calls. I have had a chance to use this detector dozens & dozens of times already.First, the construction of it doesn’t seem extremely robust but, for what it is, I wasn’t extremely worried about that as long as it works. It does work but you have to understand what it is. This detector picks up on, if I recall correctly, 200 ppm (parts per million) as a low alert and 500 ppm as a high alert. It changes tone & displays a yellow light for a low alert & changes tone again & displays a red light for a high alert.That’s not very sensitive. For comparison, a high quality combustible gas detector picks up on levels at least as low as 50 ppm. Real world, what that means is this one basically picks up on a decent sized active leak if you’re right at the source. In other words, if you can smell gas you can pretty reliably use this to find the leak at the source, right where it’s leaking, assuming it’s still leaking. If the leak isn’t bad enough to smell the gas it’s unlikely you could find it with this. You could walk into a room where you smell gas & it isn’t going to pick it up until you get the sensing tip within 1-2” of the source of the leak.What does that mean? It’s not the best leak detector to completely rely on. On the other hand, it is small & portable & it does work within its limitations. That means it’s handy to have in my tool bag as I do maintenances to spot check connections. It also works when you can smell gas, know there’s a leak and you want to find the source.By the way, it does also give an audible notification when the batteries get low. The battery life is very short compared to high quality detectors but, in this case, replacing them is as simple as screwing the bottom off to replace (2) AA batteries. I’ve had to replace the batteries twice in about a month’s use and that’s using it multiple times a day 5-6 days a week (every maintenance I go to that has a gas furnace or water heater).If you want a sensitive, highly reliable, high quality detector look elsewhere. If you want a basic, highly portable detector & understand its limitations this detector may work fine for you.

So I almost did not purchase this gas detector after reading several less than favorable reviews, but I figured as 1/4 the price of the ones getting good reviews, and I will rarely use it, might as well try it.Well after installing the propane lines on my bus conversion project, my hard wired LP alarms went off several times, I could faintly smell gas, but after hunting around with soapy water, still could not find which of the 100 or so fittings/junctions/connections/hoses it was coming from.Within 2 minutes, using the PNG2000A I had the leak isolated (a flair fitting under the on demand water heater, very hard to get bubbles on as it was vertical and in a tight space). I rally like that this has the 20% and 50% alarms allowing for isolating of the leak spot. Holding it 3" from the leak would produce the low level alarm, and right under, the high level.I would highly recommend this for someone to check their fittings or trace a leak in you RV, for a professional who will use it often, it does feel a bit cheaply made, though it is cheap. It works though, and that's what counts!

Seemed to work first couple tries. We repair and rebuild appliances. We had a gas stove with a broken line and you could smell the gas immediately. As we were repairing the line I got unit out and it wouldn't detect anything!! We even put it over an open gas line and nothing. We changed batteries and still nothing. We saw comments about similar issues and they claimed that cleaning tip helped.. we did this and still nothing.. I was so disgusted I threw it in trash. I've gone back to soapy water for checking lines and connections. I'd like to get same type of unit around same price but I'm very skeptical now.