Does a 15,000 BTU Burner require a larger gas line? I'm thinking of upgrading my cheap apartment stove to one with more heat.  The current stove's hottest burner is around 8000BTU; I'm looking at one which has one 15K BTU and two 9000BTU burners.  I'm located in California, USA.

My question is: if I have an apartment gas line which was installed for the old, low-heat stove, am I likely to need a larger pipe going into the kitchen for a hotter stove?  Or does a standard apartment stove natural gas line already supply more gas pressure than I can use?  And if the answer is "it depends", what diameter am I looking for?
I believe that the size of the piping does matter. In Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck Cookbook he tales an interesting tale from the early days of the restaurant. I found the story online (2nd paragraph):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2001/nov/17/weekend.hestonblumenthal

Excerpt from the article:  


  Traditionally, we have always been told to plunge green vegetables
  into a large quantity of boiling, heavily salted water, so that the
  quantity of cold beans added was not enough to bring the water off the
  boil. The old Fat Duck kitchen was fuelled with gas from a domestic
  pipe. This meant that we could not, in fact, bring a particularly
  large quantity of water to the boil. Because of this, we had to cook
  our green beans in batches of about eight at a time. Any more than
  this, and the water would come off the boil, leaving the beans more or
  less to stew and develop a murky brown colour.