Darrel Reifschneider contributed OPD valve, more

Darrel Reifschneider, the longtime president and CEO of Manchester Tank, died Oct. 4 at the age of 91.

LP Gas inducted Reifschneider into its Hall of Fame in 2017. Watch his induction speech.

Reifschneider was born in Kelim, Colorado, in 1933. According to his obituary, he dedicated his life to family, faith and the pursuit of excellence in his career.

In his early days at Manchester Tank, Reifschneider sought a solution to recurring propane cylinder accidents in the field that were related to overfills.

He developed an interest in fuel protection devices as far back as the early 1970s, according to an LP Gas Hall of Fame profile on him in 2017, ahead of his induction. Manchester Tank conducted stop-fill research for years, and it manufactured a line of stop-fill devices in the 1980s for motor fuel tanks. But the devices had not been mandated on cylinders – even by the mid-1990s.

After years of development, Reifschneider brought a stop-fill device to market in Manchester Tank’s overfill prevention device (OPD).

“If you have to take one thing in our lives that made the company, it was the OPD,” Reifschneider says in the article. “It changed the whole picture, although it took 20 years to get there. And it took eight years to get the product developed and approved.”

Manchester Tank also persisted on the adoption of a new code requiring a stop-fill unit to be installed on all 5-, 20-, 30- and 40-pound cylinders. NFPA 58 enacted OPD requirements in 1998.

While the OPD was Reifschneider’s brainchild, it was his brother Rob who guided the stop-fill device through the years-long adoption process.

Under Reifschneider’s leadership, Manchester Tank also received praise for manufacturing autogas tanks when the market was limited, introducing powder coating to tank designs and developing other tanks to meet a market need.

“Every day was a good day over the course of 52 years building propane cylinders,” he says in the article.

A celebration of Reifschneider’s life was held Oct. 9 in Franklin, Tennessee.