Monday, 21 January 2008: RIYADH - It's an inescapable backbreaker every now and then for most men - having to heave a heavy metal gas cylinder out of the house and into the car, then out of the car and back in again with a refilled - and heavier -replacement, and once more, out of the car and into the house.
And that's only one cylinder. Larger households use up two to four cylinders a month.
Now it appears that an end to the agony is in sight.
Gas-cylinder stations are planning to replace their heavy metal cylinders with lightweight fiberglass ones.At Riyadh's Saad Hamdan Eid Al-Shalwi gas-cylinder station in Riyadh, there was elation when they heard the news, and skepticism as well - "We've been hearing about it for some months now," said Mohammad, one of the workers, from Kerala state in India.
The station sells 300 full cylinders daily. "We have only four workers," said Afsar, from Bangladesh. "It's a back-breaking job. We get no sleep - body aches. The nights are terrible and we have to take pain killers."
The four work 12 hours a day. They said fiberglass should reduce the weight of each cylinder by 10-12 kilograms.
For now, each metal cylinder filled with 11 liters of gas weighs 25 kilogram.
Gas cylinders is Saudi Arabia are produced by the Saudi Gas Cylinder Factory, which came on stream in 1982. Production began with two cylinder sizes, 26.5 and 52.5 liters which were designed for domestic and commercial applications. Portable 5 liter, 7 liter 26.2 liter and 35.7 liter cylinders were added to the range soon after.
Factory expansion saw the introduction of a separate tank manufacturing line. This line produces seven different large capacity LPG tanks of 1001, 2000, 2450, 3000, 4000, 4880 and 7000 liters capacity. These are for commercial use.
The annual production capability of the Saudi Gas Cylinder Factory is a total of 550,000 cylinders and 3,000 tanks on a single shift basis.
By Shahid Ali Khan
© The Saudi Gazette 2008
