There are much more powerful sources of both heat and electricity underneath the hood of your car.
The cell phone thing is nothing but a silly internet hoax that too many people took seriously. People have tried experimentally to ignite gasoline with a cell phone and nobody's been able to do it yet. These are people that specifically set out to create fire through any means they could imagine, and they failed. The cell phone thing is just an email hoax that got forwarded all over creation by a whole lot of gullible schmucks. Parroting it around all these years later is not an enhancement to ones credibility.
It is technically possible to ignite gasoline with a cigarette, although it's so incredibly unlikely as to not be worth worrying about. It takes very specific conditions, and you have to actually be trying to create fire.
Starting a fire with a PV? Yes, there is electricity and heat. Both of these are enclosed inside a nice protective metal enclosure (just like all of the much more powerful sources of electricity and heat underneath the hood of your car).
Do you refuse to go home after work and spend the night at the office on a rainy day for fear that you'll get struck by lightning walking to your car? THAT is a much more realistic and rational fear than anything being discussed in this thread.
The stuff being talked about here is BEYOND silliness.
Unless your fill spout is
IN the engine compartment, you're not going to get enough concentration to reach LEL that far away. The cubic meters of air space increases exponentially the farther you get from the source. Think of the air between you and the source as a cone. If you are .5 meters away from the source, the air space that has to be filled to 1.4% concentration of gasoline vapors is about 1.5 cubic meters. If you are 5 meters away, that volume increases to about 157 cubic meters. Moving a mere 16 feet from the pump increases the amount of gasoline vapor that would have to bleed off from the source by over 100 times. That's the difference I'm talking about between standing
at the pump versus standing by the front bumper. For the vapor concentration to reach LEL at 5 meters, it would almost literally knock you out at .5 the concentration at that point would be so high. Funny enough, LEL at 5 meters would almost certainly be above UEL meaning the concentration would be so high that there's not enough oxygen for ignition to happen.
Which is why, if you bothered to read, I stated that it was
not cell phones causing the fires, but rather static electricity bridging between 2 conductors. I stated that because, on many e-cigs, there are exposed electrical contacts of questionable quality. Any point where electricity can bridge a gap is a potential ignition source...
and as I stated, this includes your own skin to a ground. I personally ground out prior to lifting the pump. Perhaps a little overly cautious, but I worked in the environmental remediation field for a number of years and have seen what happens when un-grounded electronic devices are around gasoline vapors when they reach LEL. Looks really cool...scary as all hell. Have you ever seen a 10,000 gallon steel underground storage tank dance? I have. The tank wasn't completely empty and had not yet been properly ventilated when the vapors reached LEL and ignited. The heat from the ignition vaporized more gas from the tank and kept the cycle going for a good 30 seconds with this 15 ton tank tap dancing.
I've stood at UST pits, vent lines and product lines with an LEL meter and I can tell you for a fact, gasoline reaching its LEL directly at a gas pump is FAR more likely than a lightning strike. At that point, all it takes is an ignition source. As I stated, there are 2 on a PV. The likelihood of ignition from any source it relatively low with modern pump venting designs, I will give you that, but all it takes to make 100 times difference is to move from touching the pump to the front bumper.
We're seriously arguing about walking 5 steps away from the pump while vaping.
To me, taking a mere 5 steps and in doing so lowering my risk by an additional 100 times (on an already fairly low number) is pretty simple math.
