JoeJoe wrote:
On 18/11/2015 10:55, Capitol 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.

Reminded me...

We went away in February a few years ago for two weeks. The flight was
in the afternoon, so I dashed to the shops in the morning to buy
something last minute, and noticed a few lorries parked around 200m
away, which was strange.

We returned late afternoon on a Saturday to find the house at around
0c, and no heating. Speaking to the neighbours we found out that the
gas pipes in the street have been renewed during our time away, but as
our meter was indoors they were unable to connect us.

This resulted in quite impressive community spirit - we were given 3
convector heaters + 4 hot water bottles by neighbours (the kid were
only 2 and 4 at the time), and we all slept on the floor, fully
clothed, in the smallest bedroom in the house.

On the positive side: the gas people were back first thing the next
day (Sunday) and reconnected us, but better still, they moved the
meter to the outside, saving us the £800 we were quoted when booking
for them to do it a month later, when the work on our extension was
due to start...






I see you had even less warning than we had. I checked out my
drain down hoses yesterday and found out that I had binned them as the
plastic went rigid. A quick trip to Toolstation ensued. As this is a 6
week trip the risk of frost damage is considerable. I'm resigned to the
suffering. Fortunately the workshop has both a woodburning stove and a
heat pump, so we can live there during the daytime when we return. It
also has phone,TV and internet, so the over engineering is paying off!
Looks like the immersion heater is going to come in useful also.

That means all we're going to be short of when we return is whole
house heating for about a week. Reminds us of our childhood with the
frost on the inside of the windows!