"Flats explosion injures eight
Two people are in a critical condition and eight others are injured after an explosion at a block of flats in Wigan.
Rescue teams spent the night looking for anyone still trapped. John Thorne reports."
What odds are you offering?
CORGI response: "Well just imagine how bad it would have been if an amateur had done the work!"
At the moment, with no information other than that story, I'd put my money on Corgi (of some sort) - that is, not DIY. That is just a guess.
Last time I was in a block of flats I was blown up as well. Not quite the same way though.
In message , Old Git writes
30 seconds ago on the news ..."police don't know the cause, but it's thought not to be suspicious"
CORGI then
My chandelier incident pales into insignificance by comparison...
Surely the most likely is cowboy builders doing some gas plumbing on the side?
I rent a shop underneath a flat. The guy upstairs scares me to death. We have only been in for 6 months and he has flooded us twice with washing machine/bath incidents and had a chip fan fire. One of his fuses blew during the latter and he was in the basement where the meters are. He asked if I had any fuse wire (despite it being a 'proper' fuse but he but he decided he was going to run some fuse wire down the side of it) It was a 45 amp, I only had 5, 15 and 30. He felt that a length of 30 and 15 would do the trick, I told him I was having nothing to do with it and withdrew the offer of the lend of fusewire. Fortunately he managed to break the holder and ended up getting the electrician in. I just know he is going to blow us up at some point.
I'm not corgi registered, nor even a plumber, but I've just installed a condensing boiler in my own house.
Contrastingly, about 7 years ago, we had the gas meter changed - Transco informed us that it needed to be changed for some reason or other and they arrived to do the work, when I got home from work on the day it was being changed, they had been and gone....I didn't notice the smell of gas at first and went to the pub, when I got back at about midnight, the house was full of gas and there was my mum sitting having a cig while watching TV (she had a very poor sense of smell after smoking for fifty odd years), but luckilly the living room door was shut but the upstairs and the hall was full of gas. I switched the gas off at the meter (I could hear it pissing out) opened the front door fully and opened all the upstairs windows for half an hour then phoned transco - they came out mob handed - at least 10 of them....I'd already had a look once the danger was over and the main nut that tightens the meter to the mains, just after the stoptap was just placed on - not even finger tight, and when I tried to tighten it, lo and behold it was the wrong size, and not just by a little bit - it was like a prick in a shirt sleeve.
After the emergency team had been talking quietly for a while and much general tut-tutting, I asked them what the problem was, half expecting some bullshit answer, but to give them their due they told me the truth, some numpty hadn't got the correct fitting and had simply said bollocks to it and gone home....they /said/ he would be in serious trouble and he'd probably get sacked but that was probably just to pacify me.
Phil L wrote: the house was full
If you came in the house through the front door & hall, and your mum was smoking a cigarette in the living room with the door shut, did you attend to switching off the gas & opening all the windows BEFORE opening the living room door and saying hello to mum, or....
Did you march straight through, open the living room door, take a look at each other and ...
come back here in a new life?
Slightly similar story here after our gas meter was moved (no ciggy smoking mum though).
Smelt gas after the job was done and found leak under floor where they'd T'ed into exisiting pipework.
Men came out and sucked teeth and pointed out that I'd have to pay as there were compression fittings there "which obviously must be the source of the leak". A quick spay with some leak revealing spray showed that it was clearly the new soldered joint that was leaking.
I now have my own manometer and put my trust in my own hands rather than those who b*gger off home after a job.
Tim
There are actually four options not two.
DIY, CORGI, Unregistered Cowboy, or NG TRANSCO.
It was the The last ones blew my dad's flat up, Oct 2007.
I'd say the odds on it being someone who was a 'pro' is 99%+
I thought about Transco as I wrote the OP. But decided it was getting too pedantic - I'd just lump them in with Corgi as 'professional'. :-)
"HEATING systems at a flat complex rocked by a massive explosion had only recently been switched from electric to gas, the M.E.N can reveal."
"?It seems it was caused by a gas leak because I heard someone say they had smelled it for up to four hours before there was this tremendous explosion.?"
Sadly I would have a bet on that as well!
As I think I mentioned on here before - the last "pro" gas job I looked at was a boiler installed for my next door neighbour. Fitters mate turns up pissed. Installs Biasi combi about 5 degrees off the vertical. For the condensate drain he drills a 15mm hole through the wall (biggest drill bit he has!), sticks some 15mm copper pipe though, leaving it dangling in free space over a concrete path. He then effects a joint to the corrugated plastic condensate drain by winding some turns of insulating tape round the pipe end, and stuffing the plastic pipe over the end of the copper (which he has mounted so that it has to run away up hill). Then having commissioned the boiler, he leaves having not connected the room stat on the grounds it was "not compatible" with the boiler. Real fitter returns the following day. Fixes a number of gas leaks apparently. Still does not fix the stat or condensate drain. The pipework is a mess, and the soldering looks like it had been done with a trowel.
I tried to get them to contact CORGI and complain, or at least withhold payment until the job was done to a basic standard, but they did not even want them back in the house again.
So in the end, I ended up helping the neighbour fix the most noticeable problems, and doing a proper gas soundness test for them. We managed to get the boiler almost upright. The fitter claimed that there was no problem with the condensate drain venting emptying straight onto a path "since very little will flow out of it". It turns out he was actually right - it seemed to deposit most of its output on the kitchen worktop where it leaked through the insulating tape "seal", so we changed that to 20mm plastic solvent weld and plumbed it into the existing kitchen waste. Finally we hooked up their existing modern programmable stat to the waiting terminals in the boiler.
I think I kept some photos....
Ah yes - a pissed boiler - note the blue lines on the wall actually represent something close to vertical - so the pipe is on the piss as well, just not as much as the boiler:
Trying for silver-plated pipe effect?
I think they were going for silver and green - they obviously never wiped the flux off anything! ;-)
"A spokesman for the council and Wigan and Leigh Housing confirmed contractors had undertaken work at the block of flats as part of an ongoing repair and maintenance programme across the area, but emphasised the investigation had not decided on any cause yet and the extent of the damage was making it difficult to identify a source.
The spokesman said: ?There has been no suggestion at this stage that this work could be responsible for the explosion.?
Wigan and Leigh Housing has been undertaking a programme of converting properties from electric storage heaters to gas central heating since the summer.
At this stage there is no plan to delay any conversion work. The spokesman said: ?It would be imprudent to take any decision before the investigating team produces its findings. It could be another week before a cause is known.?"
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