Cadent replacing gas pipes. Anyone experienced this?

[JenniferBooth]

This is going to be happening on a housing estate where a friend of mine lives. I was round there when a letter about it was delivered. They are asking for quite a lot including access to homes from 7.30 am on wards and then want to be in and out all day amongst a lot of other things like digging up drives. Has anyone had any experience of this The experiences of it ive read on their trustpilot dont fill me with confidence.

@InAMess2023 Ooh looks like its our turn soon, We have had a leaflet through on Friday.

Our were ridiculous- four separate times they asked for someone to be home and didn't turn up and then tuned up unannounced

Luckily I was WFH and most of the neighbours were retired or had a sahm

They’re doing my town at the moment and it’s been a bloody nightmare. Endless roadworks, endless temporary traffic lights that stay in place for weeks without anyone actually doing any work, they’ve churned all all the verges and we had to speak to our local counsellor about the litter they left behind.

The roadworks have been the worst thing tbh. Every other road has a set on. We have two sets on our road alone and they easily add ten minutes to each journey.

Ridiculous. I live right opposite a school Its going to be carnage

They did ours about 3 years back. Other than they told us it was going off with one set of houses (we're on a corner) and I told them it wouldn't because we're connected to our neighbours the other side in a complicated way, and they gave that "stupid woman, we know our job" look. Ten minutes later they were back telling me I was right, and our gas would go off the next day. They were apologetic, but not enough to dig up the brambles in our front garden as I suggested as a compensation.
After that they were fine, and were really helpful if we needed to go in and out. Although I did give them a jug of iced water a couple of times as it was over 30deg, so they were pretty well disposed towards us. 🤣

Done loads round us. In Surrey. A right pain during, and messy afterwards and they don't 'make it good' properly. Awful.

We have found them to use intimidation tactics. By trying to use one method and keep their costs down they are trying to ruin our drive (it’s quite long) and relocate our brand new meter into an ugly box outside (we have just re rendered our house). In addition they tried to insist our extension work must stop, scaffold be moved and at no charge to them. The arrogance is astounding. They actually threatened to cut off our gas and refuse to put it back on if we prevented them dig up our drive. The patches throughout our village they have done are poor, no seals around them, bumpy and the wrong texture finish for the roads. They stand out like a sore thumb.

if you stand your ground they do have alternatives available which are better for the property owner. In our case they eventually admitted they can relive our gas feed without digging up the drive and will pay all costs to our builder for any delays they cause. Please do not allow them to intimidate you into accepting something that is not right, or which may spoil your drive/property.

Thanks @Thomp12 Im in a HA flat. Ive just got home from being away and it looks like Cadent are going to be blocking the only way out of the flats car park if you are in a vehicle This is from Monday. I have an appointment on Tuesday which was booked five weeks ago.
My parents own their own home and are about an 8 min car ride away, They have block paving and have done ever since the house was built in the 1960s.

Its the bullying and intimidation that i find appalling.

Yep, happened here and an absolute cock up.

Roads/pavements were dug up which meant people couldn't get their cars in/out of their drives.

They put some kind of liner in the existing pipe between the mains under the pavement and our meter (which is inside). They couldn't thread it through in one go as it was too far to push, so they dug two holes on the drive, which they botched to reinstate (rough and untidy).

They came into the house to check it over and turned on the gas.

All OK, or so they told us.

Then we started having trouble with our boiler which kept cutting out with error messages. Got our emergency boiler repair firm out to check it over and they almost immediately discovered our gas supply was under-pressure which is what was causing the boiler error. They couldn't do anything themselves but logged a fault with the national grid network people, and then turned off our gas.

National grid people came a couple of days later, checked the pressure themselves and confirmed it was too low. Apparently the liner had narrowed the pipe too much so not enough gas could get through. They dug a new channel the entire length of our drive for a new pipe. But they were only "diggers" apparently and couldn't put a new pipe in. For that, we needed a different team who came the next day, laid the new pipe but apparently weren't allowed to "connect" it at either end. So that was another team the next day, who connected it. Then it was another few days until yet another team came to reinstate our drive, and again, made a right shoddy job of it.

So, all in all, a very disruptive and inconvenient job, most of which down to the bodge merchants who put in the liner and didn't check the pressure (apparently they should have done, and probably did, but decided to leave it anyway so they didn't have to spend time sorting it themselves!!).

Trouble is that they use cheap contractors and there seems no quality control over their work (which is a common occurrence when any firm uses contractors!).

I had this but from an emergency pov rather than planned work. The gas pipes into the village failed one easter weekend. I had gone to cook dinner and there was no gas, I posted on the village fb group and everyone agreed there was no gas. So I rang up and told them that we had appeared to all run out of gas.

Well then ensued a weekend of chaos. I’ve no idea where the fault was but the main gas pipe into the village had crumbled and there were over 100 workers then working in the village for three days. No gas supply for the whole time. They shipped workers in from 200 miles away.

once the main feed was sorted every house had to be visited and the gas meter/supply at the meter turned on individually and gas appliances checked, that was a quick 2 min job.

So i would say it’s better a planned work than an emergency because three days with no heating, no hob, and for some people no oven or shower or hot water wasn’t funny.

@Thomp12 Yep As predicted they want to come into our flat and run the pipes through. Had a booklet through.

Cant wait to tell them we are capped.

They have already fucked up by cutting through a water main last week

I work for the utilities this happens all the time
when you plan works like this you get records off the water gas electric and telephone companies telling you where the services are
it depends how correct the info then send you is
telling you it’s safe to dig free of services and the info they send you is sometimes wrong

Another example of the fact that nothing works properly in this shithole ofa country

Presumably having out of date information isn't exclusive to the UK 🙄

But perhaps a "can't be arsed to check" attitude is more common in the UK!

When the gas sub contractors did ours, they dug straight through the telephone and fibre cabling. The thing was it was bloody obvious as the fibre had only been installed a couple of years earlier and you couldn't fail to see the new tarmac strip going right down the whole street in the middle of the pavement, with small rectangular boxes outside everyone's house.

Gas sub contractors just dug straight across it outside several peoples' houses severing the fibre/phone cables in numerous places. They didn't "learn" after the first time and just carried on doing it.

Nor did they tell anyone. It was up to each individual householder to report the "fault" to BT/Virgin and it took them a couple of weeks to organise the repairs, by which time the gas sub contractors had filled in and re-tarmaced all their holes so BT/Virgin had to dig it all up again, find the cuts and repair them.

A complete fiasco.

They are round here now drilling holes in the building.