Time Served Skilled Plumber

I would like to think that any plumber registered to deal with a Gas system would have been trained on how to do the job, certainly. Brian

"Brian Gaff \(Sofa 2\)" snipped-for-privacy@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in news:r9e9ek$thv$ snipped-for-privacy@news.albasani.net:

Or just how to join the pipes and do a leak test?

Plumber is a fairly generic term, and does not necessarily imply they are also gas fitters, or particularly knowledgeable about heating systems.

Having said that, many will be since that it probably what most of their customer's will expect.

As in many trades there are plenty that have the skills, and can produce a safe working result by following the guidance / training.

Fault finding skills and diagnostics are a somewhat different skill set, and some are significantly better than others.

Pipe sizing calcs are fairly fundamental to gas fitting and covered in detail in snappily titled BS 6891, "Installation of low pressure gas pipework of up to 35 mm (R1.25") in domestic premises (2nd family gas) ? Specification"

(they are also fairly straight forward - one of these days I will put a summary of the process on the wiki)

I remember when my father had our first central heating system fitted circa 1963. The plumber installed the boiler and radiators and pipe work, we then had to wait for an electrician to come and do all the electrical connections within the boiler and to the mains.

These days we tend to find the one installer doing all aspects of the installation and as a result have gone upmarket titling themselves as heating engineers. These days I tend to regard the likes of bathroom fitters as plumbers.

Richard

When we had a total sudden failure (due to British Gas deliberately putting the old one out of commission to get sales) we employed a local guy we trusted. He started work only three days later (middle of cold winter).

He didn't do electrics so I did them, and of course saved money.

The builder who built our extension 15 years ago used an old school plumber to create a complicated lead valley.

Do many modern plumbers also have this skill?

Mike

Lead working for roofs and fixing lead pipes are rather different skills. Of course as with many skills they can overlap somewhat.

I remember as a kid many firms were plumbers and electricians. Never did find out why the two should have been thought to be similar.

At the turn of the 20th century, before standardisation, from looking at old photographs, there were plenty of high street outfits that serviced all three utilities, gas, water, and electricity. As well as being hardware shops to boot some of them. Each town or suburb would have a few such outfits who people or landlords would go to, who employed all sorts of tradesmen; maybe glaziers as well.

Same as later. You often got shops selling both radios and bicycles for some reason. And maybe charging radio accumulators to boot. From memeory that may have been how Curry's started.

michael adams

...

Was threading conduit any different from threading water pipes (before the age of copper)?

In Edinburgh there is the world famous Borland's Darts and Television

Owain

In the west of Scotland such shops also sold fishing tackle

Yes, Curry's was originally a cycle shop. My first "grown up" bicycle came from them.

When mine was done I provided the SFCU, wired it, wired the RF receiver to the boiler and located and set up the stat/programmer. I don't know what the fitters would have done - they looked lost even (trying) to RTFI! They had one impact drill between two of them, it went intermittent so I checked it, found a break near the drill and rewired it. Didn't offer them my Bosch as I felt that they were a tad cruel to tools. To be fair, the system has done 20.5 yeras and is still going (cross fingers!).

Quite possibly...

One of my customers was a long time served plumber, but he got out of actual plumbing and into teaching when his knees had had enough!

He taught various C&G plumbing courses at the local college. He said many of the students got a bit miffed that the plumbing courses still included quite substantial amounts of lead burning and roof work (box gutters, flat roofs, and also flashings etc)