Gas and electricity meters - ancient and need moving?!

[SleepBecomesHim321]

I've found advice on here so helpful so would be very grateful if anyone had anything to say about this (niche) issue.

We're hoping to start converting our integral garage soon but it's riddled with hurdles! Firstly, probable asbestos in ceiling (we're arranging a survey to test), and secondly the gas and electricity meters look a) ancient and b) we need the pipes moved too, I think. Pics attached (I don't think they reveal our location).

I understand we need to contact the owners of the gas and electricity supplies - not just our provider - but I don't know how to get advice about what we actually want them to do. It seems you have to pay a substantial cost even to get advice - and then there's multiple phases and contractors you need to deploy.

I was wondering if anyone could comment: should we upgrade both meters? And how straightforward is this? At the moment our gas pipe runs along the garage wall at about chest height. We'd need to get this buried (?) so we could put a doorway in, or boarded in (?) and a section raised - but this may all be counter to planning regs!

We're obviously doing our own research and will seek professional advice but if anyone has any comments or experience, they'd be gratefully received! Thanks.

When we converted our integral garage our builder's advice was not to move the electric meter as it would be very costly. We put in a new fuse board next to it and boxed ours in creating a cupboard with shelving above and below - same style meter as yours but the accompanying wiring etc was neater.

The gas meter (same style) was in the adjacent attached garage, so we didn't have to do anything with that.

CAB suggests that it could be between £400 to over £1000 to move a supply and meter here.

Having had a gas meter replaced in a property you will get one that looks identical. Electric meter is old but perfectly serviceable. Looks like you have fuses , not breakers / RCD - again perfectly serviceable but I suspect that if you are having works done it will be necessary to replace the fuse box.

Dont go for a smart meter until the technology matures or ( dream on) the programme is canned.

Thank you very much for your feedback. I had a gas engineer round today who's given advice about what to actually apply for, move-wise, from the gas board.

Just to check I've understood, it may be best to update our elec board thingy to a switches box (rather than fuses) but otherwise leave set-up unchanged and consider boxing in? Walls will need to be plasterboarded/lined (just bare brick at mo) so that'll need to be factored in too I suppose.

Thanks.

Not qualified to comment fully, but breakers and RCDs are more modern than fuses. You may also want to look at the main intake, if your bullet fuse is 60a that may want to go up to 100A if you have a big house. That is a specialist job and needs coordination between the electricity provider and your electrician.

One thing that isn't legal with fuses are outside sockets.