Cooking with Gas!

Finally! All of my gas issues have been sorted, and the correct meter has been installed.

As a recap, I've well and truly over provisioned gas in the house. I've allowed for a full commercial kitchen in the galley (with plans to do so! [one day...]); I have a 3/4" gas line capped, just sitting in the wall, waiting for me.

I've also added another 3/4" gas line in the alfresco. This is big enough to heat a spa/pool.

All up, the energy budget ran to around 750MJ/hr. Not your usual domestic supply by any means!

So, the plumber put the request into Energy Australia, and the entered it incorrectly. Some nuff-nuff probably 'corrected' it, and put 400MJ/hr.

So EA installed this gas meter:

It did not look right, so I called EDMI in Dandenong, and I enquired about the specifications of this meter. The answer came back at a maximum capacity of 370MJ/hr! So, not only had they put the wrong figure into their system, the meter supplied would not meet it anyway!

So I let everyone know that it was the wrong one.

This is where the fun and games began.

EA turned around and asked for a Compliance Certificate for the Gas Meter, effectively asking me/PD to justify the gas usage. To which I duly supplied the original details I specified pre-tender!

A few days later, this monster appeared!

Given the previous issues, I checked with EDMI again, and I got an answer of 466MJ/hr. On no, not again!

Well, to summarise a lot of calls and misinformation, the figure EDMI gave me was indeed correct; when the input pressure is 1.1kPa. However, in this case, the input pressure to the meter is 2.75kPa, which means the same meter, on a higher pressure is capable of well over 900MH/hr. So it is fine for what we need!

Whew!

The final issue of note, one that only came out when I sent the above picture to the plumbers, was that had not had it communicated back to them that the meter was not against the house, where the gas point of entry is. Due to the placement of an external power point (and talking to my SS, downpipes as well! [Huh?]) the gas meter needs to be moved to the fence, in my case 1.8m away.

So they were sent to dig a trench to connect the gas meter to the house.

Where of course they hit rock. Of course.

As far as I know, we are still on course for settlement tomorrow, but tomorrow is another day.

Goodnight.