Tim+ wrote:
wrote:

Friday last, about lunchtime, a missive dropped through the
letterbox which said that the gas main was being renewed, possibly from
8am that morning and that the supply would be interrupted at some time
in December to allow for repiping. Having 4 weeks ago booked to
travel for December and January, I queried the likely procedure for a
customer who was abroad. It seems that continuity of gas supply is not
assured during this work so someone needs to be present to relight the
boiler after an interruption. In my case, this is not possible as the
neighbours are non technical and the local intelligent friends have all
done the dirty on me and died!

So, I looked into the choices, either I put antifreeze into the
heating system or I had to drain down the entire heating system. The
hot/cold system has to be drained down anyway as the pipework runs
through the loft, but this is easy. I did a quick sum on the amount of
water involved in heating and came up with a rough figure of 250L, 150L
of which is in the pipework. This requires in the region of 40L of
antifreeze for about -6C protection. The cost of this was over £150, and
required a lot of work to drain out and measure this amount of water. It
looks like a massive drain the system down exercise and coming home to a
cold house with no gas supply for some time.

The only good point is that at least I had an immediate email
response from the project supervisor when I queried what was going on.

One of my neighbours has already departed for Spain for Xmas.
He has no idea of what is going on!

I don't know how many houses per day the contractors expect to
connect, but I have worked out that they only have 22 working days from
their latest start date of the of the 30th November to the end of
December and 29 houses to connect!

The lack of advance warning is appalling.


Where is your meter? If it's indoors, they need to get access to shut off
the gas supply. If they can't get access, expect to find a hole in the
pavement outside your house and that you're not connected to the new main.
Of course they may plumb the new supply to a new external meter box but
obviously without access they can't join it all up.

Could you not give a key to the project supervisor or leave one with a
neighbour to allow access? I'm sure this situation is far from rare and
that they're used to finding ways of dealing with it. I imagine that
they'd like you to do all the organising regarding access and re-lighting
but if that's not possible, I bet they have contingency plans.

Tim


For insurance purposes, the house has Fort Knox security!
There's no way they can get access to the garage mounted meter full of
securely immobilised car without major damage. They are happy to do a
re connect in February, just when is open to debate. The meter is built
into the garage cupboard storage system, which as I built it, is
designed to come apart, but only with major effort and will take a full
day to do. There is no convenient mounting point for an external meter
and it will cost them a fortune to replumb the piping. Their preferred
minimum cost system is to internally sleeve the existing gas supply pipe.