What to Look For When Looking For a Plumbing Service Provider

Gas piping and what you need to know:

One of the toughest things still to do in this industry is estimating a job over the phone? We never can know the whole story on what the practicality of doing a job will be as well we can’t accept the fact that we will get enough information from the Homeowner.

Take for instance this conversation I had with a homeowner moving into a new home. They had a gas dryer and no gas line. I asked a few questions and got what sounded like correct information. I quoted $400 to $600 to bring a gas line up from the basement to behind the gas dryer and hook up the dryer.

We scheduled the gas line install. I showed up ready to go to work when to my surprise the house was enormous. With 12’ ceilings in the basement. The closet gas line t the area of the laundry was 45’ away.

At this point I was on an estimate call with my apprentice ready to go to work. The new cost to bring a gas line to the laundry area was $1400.

As you can imagine I was hoping to get started although the homeowner looked at me very sincerely and said it would probably be cheaper if they just purchased an electric dryer?? Yes, is all I could say.

When you can’t see what you think you can see:

Like all types of piping Gas pipe can be run in and behind walls and ceiling. Through the ground and sleeved through larger pipes. Knowing exactly what and how they got there is very hard to know. We have an area in my local town of a particular type of house that was built and we all know them by the name of the builder. They were built 40 to 60 years ago. The builder and mechanical contractor used some very progressive methods for the time period. One unusual application with the gas piping was how they ran a larger gas line through the slab foundation and the slab floor only to weld a smaller pipe in and out of the larger piping at the meter and boiler terminations.

This is very much like a commercial gas line installation but on a residential application. I have changed out many of these boilers over the years and one of the trickiest situations is capping off this old gas pipe and getting a new line from the meter to the boiler. Remember we are in a slab house no basement.

New Gas types of gas pipe:

Gas pipe has changed over the years. We now have plastic pipe for the curb cox to the house meter. We can now use a flexible coiled gas line through out the house or building to run to any gas appliance. Think flexible line to your gas dryer or kitchen gas stove. This new product like all new products is designed to save time on installation as well as make retro fitting gas heating and cooking appliance more widely used in more applications. It also has come with their own new problems.

Over the past number of years, we were dealing with the new piping and its non-ability to be grounded. Like steel pipe that was used before it was a good grounding material. Although the new piping was aluminum and was not a good conductor of grounding. This presented a war of attrition on pointing the finger at everyone on when would be responsible for grounding this new piping. It took a few years and the manufacture came of with a new sleeve material on the corrugated piping that seemed to have satisfied everyone involved.

Trusted Partners

Manufacturers that we Work With