On Sun, 28 Aug 2005 12:48:35 +0100, Dave Matthews wrote:

Hi folks,

My brother and I were recently lifting some chipboard flooring in my
house in order to lay a new electrical cable. Because the chipboard was
tongue & groove, rather than ripping out the whole floor, we decided to use
a circular saw to just cut out the section we needed to get at. So little
bro is happily sawing away when water starts to gush out! What had happened
was that rather than running the water and gas pipes through the vertical
centre of the joinsts, bl**dy McAlpines had simply cut shallow grooves into
the *tops* of the joists and laid the pipes in them. In fact on one
particular joist, the grooves were too shallow and caused the pipes to
protrude slightly above the top of the joist - hence the chipboard flooring
was literally resting on the pipes and I'd been unwittingly walking on them
for the last thirteen years!

Anyway we got the leak sorted but I was wondering whether this was
common practice in modern construction (my house was built in 1991) as it
seems to me to be a literally explosive safety issue!

I have now marked the boards in bright red marker pen to warn whomever
buys the property off me!

--

This is certainly against current building regs and may well have been
contrary to the regs in force when the house was built.
It probably went undetected by the BCO when the house was built.

Using plastic pipe and a right-angled drill putting the water pipe through
the centre of the joists is not a big problem.

The gas pipe will be very difficult to correct. Sometimes a hole can be
drilled in the wall outside and the pipe pushed through (did that once
to avoid putting a pipe outside at the front).


--
Ed Sirett - Property maintainer and registered gas fitter.
The FAQ for uk.diy is at http://www.diyfaq.org.uk
Gas fitting FAQ http://www.makewrite.demon.co.uk/GasFitting.html
Sealed CH FAQ http://www.makewrite.demon.co.uk/SealedCH.html