Changing gas and electric prepayment meters

My last day in my job was 8 February and I moved properly into the new house on saturday 9 Feb, I had arranged for the gas and electric meters to be changed on Tuesday 12 Feb in the morning. So I was up bright and early and the first engineer to arrive was the gas engineer. I showed him to the meter and he looked at it and unbelievably said that he couldn’t change the meter because it had an earthing cable attached to it and he wasn’t allowed to touch it because he wasn’t a qualified electrician! I found this difficult to understand as it is an earth cable not a live electric cable and I said this to him. He still refused to change it and I said I would disconnect it but he said he wouldn’t do it then either. He said he would arrange for someone to come back once an electrician had disconnected the earth cable so I insisted he arranged for it to be done the following day he seemed surprised that it would be so soon but I told a white lie that my partner was an electrician and would disconnect it that evening for me.

Anyway he left and a couple of hours later the electrician arrived to replace the electric meter and I told him what the gas engineer had said and he couldn’t believe it as he said to me ‘why wouldn’t he do it it isn’t live?!’. So the electric meter was changed with no hassle or problems and it was nice to know the electrician agreed with me!

Wednesday arrives and a different gas engineer arrived and checked the meter and I told him the same story about the day before and he was stunned as he pointed out under UK regulations the gas meter is legally required to be earthed and therefore the engineer from the day before clearly didn’t know his job!!! So he quickly changed the meter and then did various checks to ensure everything was correct. He found that the gas pressure wasn’t high enough at the meter it should have been a bar pressure of around 20 but it only had a pressure of 15 which isn’t enough as this then drops when the gas is being used. So he switched off the gas and called out for a team to come and find out why the pressure to the meter was so low (luckily this isn’t something I will be charged for!)

An hour or so later the new team arrived and lifted floorboards in the hall trying to find the pipe supplying the meter which is under the stairs. They couldn’t find the pipe and thought it must go under the living room floor which was a problem since we have laminate flooring in there at the moment! So then they moved to the front garden and dug a big hole and found a very old (probably original lead pipe!) pipe but they told me they knew this road had been re-piped recently and it should have been a plastic pipe. They then disappeared for a while to attend a gas leak elsewhere when they came back they then dug up the path in front of the house.

They now found the new pipe which had been pushed through the old pipe to the gas meter unfortunately when this had been done the wrong size pipe was used and it was too small which was why the gas pressure was too low (and had obviously been wrong since it had been done!) they replaced the pipe with one the correct size. Then once they had finished they had to call out another engineer to test things before the gas was switched back on for me!

Finally at about 6.30pm the last engineer turned up and did he checks and turned the gas back on for us. Hurrah!

So although this all seemed long winded at least we now know that the gas supply is correct and if we hadn’t changed the meters we would never have found this out but the low pressure would have caused lots of problems with the boiler and gas cooker (when we eventually have a kitchen!)….and best of all it didn’t cost us anything!

Moving house

Well after months of planning the contracts were exchanged and completion happened smoothly. Then the real challenge began. I had given my notice in on my job as I didn’t fancy a 3 hour commute each way although my boss would have liked me to do that and save him the stress of finding someone to replace me! But because I was leaving work in three weeks I had to do all the house packing and cleaning whilst still working which wasn’t the best idea and I would strongly recommend that you take a week off work if you are moving (even if you aren’t moving very far) as this would definitely take some of the pressure off.

Anyway, moving day was decided to be 26 February so on Friday 25 Feb I hired a van and my Dad kindly said he would drive for me as I’ve only driven a van a couple of times I wasn’t confident driving for 3 – 4 hours each way in a van full of all my stuff. So friday night we picked up the van and drove to my house and filled the van which because I’d been packing boxes for ages only took us about 1.5 hours. Then saturday morning we were up and on the road nice and early and got to my new home at about 11am, the van was unloaded a lot quicker than it was packed taking only 30 mins!

Because the house was in such a state, the previous owners never cleaned and certainly didn’t maintain the house in any way so we had loads of rubbish to get rid of but because we have double yellow lines (no parking at anytime) outside the house we can’t have a skip. So we decided to fill the van and take as much rubbish to the community tip as we could. The meant that the house immediately started to smell better!

We had checked the heating the weekend before and discovered that the gas and electric were on pre-payment meters which are a very expensive way of paying for these utilities but at least they were working! I called the supplier and arranged for them to come out and change the meters to normal meters with quarterly billing. We ran the heating constantly for 24 hours to warm the building up as it hadn’t been heated in any way for at least 6 months.

Then it was time to take the van back and work for another couple of weeks before the job finished and I could get on with the new life by the sea.