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.