No Gas and No gas certificate?

I had this issue just last week, my gas man seemed certain a gas cert is required, capped or not. The only situation where you wouldn’t need one is if there is physically no gas pipes entering the property whatsoever.

Reply to the comment left by Trapped Landlord at 10/10/2023 – 18:21
You cannot issue a certificate if gas is not available for the test.

You cannot cap the gas supply as this would probably be considered harassment.

You can follow the HSE’s advice as detailed in my previous post.

No gas presumed to mean its PAYG and there is no credit on the meter. No pint topping it up yourself as the majority of that will go towards the debt and/or recharge the Emergency Credit used.

I’ve know gas safe engineers to carry around with them a private gas meter and connect that to run the tests and then refit the original meter afters.

Not sure if that is ‘legally’ correct but it’s a way to get around the ‘no gas’ issue and test appliances and issue the CP12.

Reply to the comment left by C-cider at 10/10/2023 – 19:31
The property in question is an hmo which was capped prior to any tenants moving in , besides , meters can be capped for other reasons such as by mutual consent with the tenant or by utility companies due to non payment. This property im refering to is all electric now. My gas man still seems sure a cert is needed.

I know nothng of the procedure for testing gas systems but I do recall a case wher possession was refused because of a lack of gas certificate for a capped supply in the garage that had never been used. The judge said that any gas whatsoever on the premesis warranted a gas certificate.

Utility companies will not normally reveal any information to Landlords unless the Land lord is the account holder (bill payer). Just another example of how flawed the GDPR are. Miscreants are always protected at the expense of decent folk.

The gas inspector/plumber is correct in capping off the supply to the meter. He should also have placed a visible notice to this effect on the meter or very close by.

However, the supply to the meter is still live and remains the responsibility of both the consumer (if the supply p/p {coloured yellow} is within the property) and the utility company. Check that there is no isolation valve outside of the property severing ALL supply to the meter.

If you know the details of the Utility supplier contact them and keep copies of ALL communications.

Get rid of the scoundrel when you can legally do so.

If a gas meter is continually allowed to run out of credit and emergency credit it will isolate itself after a number of times against a time scale (6 in three months may be correct) it is not possible to put money on the meter and an engineer will have to attend to re connect the supply, the supplier at this point may demand a different payment system

Happens to me all the time.
Selective Licensing & Govt don’t ever think this would happen when they throw their new rules at us.