"Ed Sirett" wrote in message
news
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.

Not necessarily and certainly NOT when I served my apprenticeship
(carpentry) in the mid 1960's. It was a recognised procedure to notch the
top of the joists (and there is in fact a formula to calculate the maximum
depth of cut (and distance from wall) that can be made without weakening the
joist)

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

Ok as you say with plastic - but a beggar with copper pipe, especially the
bigger sizes -and usually impractical anyway.

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).

To contradict this: This is actually very easy (and safe) to correct, just
notch the joist slightly deeper and push the gas pipe down into it (as long
as the joist is not cut more than a third of its depth [highly unlikely in
this case] ) and if worried about the pipe rubbing, just buy a roll of
air-felt to put over the top of it.

I would also hazard a guess that even with the pipe touching the flooring,
there is no serious (if any) damage to it that has been caused just by
'walking' over it.