Licensed gas fitting
across Burwood

Stop reading and act. Do not touch a light switch, a power point or anything that could spark, and do not use a phone inside the building. Open doors and windows on your way out, turn the gas off at the meter if you can safely reach it, get everyone outside, and ring from outdoors. We answer 24 hours. A gas smell is the one plumbing problem where waiting until morning is never the right call.

Because the walls are solid and the appliance is not. A modern flued appliance needs its flue to terminate in a specific place with defined clearances from windows, doors, boundaries and anything above it. In a double-brick or sandstone wall, getting there is a genuine piece of work rather than a hole saw through a stud wall, and on a heritage frontage there is the further question of where it may reasonably terminate. This is the constraint that decides most gas installations in these houses.

Sometimes, and it is worth having looked at properly rather than assumed. Many original chimneys in these houses have been capped, partially demolished above the roofline, or lined for a different purpose at some point in the last century, and a flue that looks available from inside the room may not be. It has to be inspected and proven to draw before anything is connected to it. Where it is sound, it is often the tidiest solution available.

These houses were built leaky and have since been sealed. Original construction assumed air moved through gaps, open fireplaces and unsealed floors. A century later the fireplaces are blocked, the draughts are stopped and the windows may have been upgraded. Gas appliances need combustion air, and unflued appliances particularly need room ventilation to a defined standard. We check what the room actually provides rather than what it looks like it provides.

They can be, in a properly ventilated space, and they are genuinely dangerous in a sealed one. Combustion products including carbon monoxide go into the room by design with an unflued appliance, and the room's ventilation is what makes that acceptable. In a house that has been progressively draught-proofed, that assumption may no longer hold. Carbon monoxide has no colour, no smell and no taste, so nothing warns you. It is worth having checked.

Always, on every gas job, without asking. A Certificate of Compliance is legally required for gas work in NSW and it records what was done, that it was tested, and under whose licence. Keep it with the house papers. Insurers ask for it and so does anyone buying the property, and in a house of this value that matters.

A leak test and make-safe runs $200 to $450. Connecting an appliance to an existing point is $250 to $550. A new gas point or run is $450 to $1,200 depending on the route and what it has to pass through, and solid masonry is at the upper end. A flue and ventilation assessment is $180 to $350. The compliance certificate is included on every gas job.