Related to the screed thread.
The boss wants a gas connection to her new kitchen (and an induction hob!) The most practical route is under the utility floor screed, though a wall and then clipped behind the new kitchen units.
Gas work seems to have moved a lot since the copper wrapped in hessian below the screed floor here!
Any thoughts?
Track pipe?
think if in a hard conduit it's OK. But check with building regs.
Might want to lay in a steel trench that can ahve a removeable cover if floor covering allows
on 06/07/2017, Tim Lamb supposed :
What you cannot do, is use bare copper - it would be attacked by the cement. Here, when my buried pipes were installed, they used pipe which had a hard plastic sleeve.
In message , Harry Bloomfield writes
Further exploration on Tracpipe leads to lots of detailed information on installation, cutting and terminations etc.
Perhaps I should re-phrase my question to.. would a plumber walk off the job if asked to connect to a pipe laid in screed by the householder?
Apart from bend radii the only gotcha I found is a need to inspect the pipe sleeve for abrasions and carry out suitable repairs.
Ask your intended gas fitter, no problem I would have thought. He would check it is sleeved at both ends and do a drop test.
I'd guess not if he could see it had been protected - where it pokes out of the screed.
I'd not like to think that a gas pipe merely was buried in the floor. Any small leak would be a major job to fix.
Brian
You'd make sure it wasn't leaking before covering it up.
That reminds me of the water leak my parents had before I left home. It was/is a bungalow. We had a carpet fitted in my bedroom which had a cupboard in the corner where the main stop tap was.
A few hours after the carpet was fitted, we noticed a damp patch on the carpet in the doorway. It turned out that as the carpet fitter had nailed the gripper rod into the concrete floor, he had put a nail through the rising main before the stop tap. The nail was more or less plugging the hole.
It took the guy, with his mate who was a plumber, a long time to fix the leak. First they had to find the stop tap in the road. Then they had to trace where the pipe went. It had been buried a mere half an inch into the concrete floor, and not in armoured trunking. They had to dig up several feet of the floor either side of the hole to allow enough play to be able to cut out the holed section and insert a couple of compression joints and a new bit of pipe, and then fill the channel with new concrete. They also drew a diagram of where the pipe went and stuck it to the floor in case any new carpet was ever laid, to prevent it happening again.
You have to question the sanity of burying the main water inlet at such a shallow depth, in case of any holes drilled into the floor.
At least it was water and not gas...
All the suggestions are wrong including the "drop test" comment. Stop cutting corners and get yourselves a Gas Safe registered person before you kill yourself or someone else. Yes I am registered by the way.
In message , Steph writes
Sadly they are not found hanging on coat pegs. At least, not around here. A downside of self build is that tradesmen prefer working for known employers. Reliable payment, knowledgeable employers etc.
Steph was thinking very hard :
So you should be able to offer some valid advice on the correct way to do it then, rather than simply being critical..
Why should a person who's gone to the trouble and expense of getting himself Gas Safe Registered, offer free advice to anyone other than suggest that he consult another Gas Safe Registered person ?
To do so would not only be unprofessional (in terms of cutting his own throat) and potentially dangerous - he could be advising idiots for all he knows - but is probably against their Code of Conduct
michael adams
...
I can confirm that in this (rural) area. Due to influence by our architect we hired our own plumber for an extension, although we should have got the builder to employ him. He came to do the first fix (delaying everyone a fortnight in the process) and never returned despite multiple phone calls and promises. No other plumber would offer to come within six months. I don't think it was just us, the electrician seemed happy enough (though he also turned up about three months after promising to do so).
If that be his considered opinion, and policy, then his posting in a diy group could almost be considered trolling - heckling from the sidelines without contributing. If he considers he has insufficient information to specify how the job should be done he could at least say what is wrong with the proposed way of doing it.
(While we are on the subject of criticism, I don't think too much of the plumber who repaired a pipe with two buried compression joints, even if it was only water.)
Yes my dad and I were surprised that he didn't use soldered joints which (if they are done properly) are less likely to leak. But by the time we spotted it, the pipe was back in the channel and there were mixing the mortar.
It hasn't leaked in the 30 years since then - or al least, it hasn't made the carpet damp. They replaced the carpet maybe about 10 years ago so the state of the concrete was seen at that time.
The whole basis of the Gas Safe Registered system is that while some members of the public may consider themselves competent to do such work, the only real test of any such competence is one conducted by a third party against a common standard. As is the case with the Gas Safe Register. He's not advising anyone on how the job should be done, or should not be done because he has no way of knowing whether the person he'd be advising is actually competent to do that work. And further that people who haven't been judged competant by a third party - so that retired gas-fitters would probably pass muster, shouldn't be undertaking any gas work at all.
According to a gas fitter engaged in the renewal of the mains with plastic, which also involved moving the meter, in the old days gas fitters were paid according to the number of joints they made. Hence the two dog legs in the supply pipe under my kitchen floor. Whether true or not I don't know but the two dog legs were there with no obstructions in the way, and they'd hardly have done it to use up a one ft length of pipe.
michael adams
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To demonstrate his own competence?
I doubt Steph knows the answer and is simply trolling.
Or simply doesn't know himself.
That depends on the level of competency required. Most regulations are a combination of written rules and working practices. It's not rocket science to plumb in say a cooker socket, however hard you and others try.
there is nothing to stop you doing your own gas work in your own property. I fitted my boiler 29 years ago. Last month I had a Smart meter installed and the leakage tests on my installation showed not a trace of a leak.
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