Brown Electricity and Gas meter boxes

They are brown GRP.

Supply and demand.

Sometimes it works the other way round. Red 2.5m washing machine inlet hose cheaper than blue.

Overstock!

Ta

Well yes, but they seem to be trapped in a negative spiral. I see loads of white meters in walls, and think a brown one would look so much better. I'd say probably in the majority of cases brown is better, but few get fitted because they are expensive !

Anyway, I don't care, I've ordered a brown one.

Maybe the electricity is brown, a bit like brown field sites for building on.

It could be of course that they are actually made of something different to the white ones and hence they are colour coded. Brian

One does have to be careful though, very similar looking assorted cable ties in black and yellow some in pound shops where you get double the number and others in more traditional places. The problem usually is, the pound shop ones tend to go brittle in frost or sunny situations, where well known makes do not. Yet to the average person they look and feel the same. Brian

Mark Carver was thinking very hard :

Nowt to stop you painting them any colour you like, along with any surface pipes, my two are a rich red.

Mine is painted same color as the house render.

Indeed you can, and I have done that in the past. It can get easily 'chipped' etc if it's in a busy area IME

at our last house, I painted the box with a reddy-brown paint to match the brickwork.

Why not just paint it in the closest match you can find to the wall, etc?

I hate painting

Fairy nuff. Get the man who paints the house to do it for you?

On some new builds I worked at a few years (probably 7 years ago) a brown gas box was a PP requirement. The electricity meter also had to be indoors.

I would never have classed Arksey as a conservation area:-)

Maybe they are for where the voltage has been reduced?

In some conservation areas they insist on real timber sash windows, when 'conservation grade' double glazed windows with textured PVC and 'fake' tenon joints rather than diagonal welded seams would be indistinguishable ... then they allow ugly rows of meter boxes facing the street.

What about ugly rows of wheely bins in different (faded) colours?

Personally I think textured PVC looks awful, and is highly distinguishable from painted wood. But clearly YMMV.