Licensed gas fitting
across Randwick

Do not touch a light switch, a power point or anything that could spark, and never look for it with a flame. Open windows on your way out. If you can reach your meter safely, turn it off with a quarter turn so the lever sits across the pipe. In a block, knock on the doors you pass on the way down, because gas travels through cavities and stairwells and your neighbours may not have noticed. Then call from outside. If the smell is strong, ring the emergency line first and us second.

That is the real question here, and the answer is often no without the owners corporation. Most interwar blocks were never plumbed for gas to individual units. Where gas does exist it is frequently a single service into the building rather than something metered per flat, which makes the incoming supply common property. Running a new line to your unit then means crossing common property, which is a strata decision rather than a plumbing one. We tell you which situation you are in before you buy an appliance.

Not always, and it is worth checking before you commit. In a suburb with this much turnover listings get recycled and the detail drifts. We see people arrive with a gas cooktop for a flat that has never had a gas point. Ten minutes establishing what is actually connected is cheaper than a return trip and a restocking fee.

Not before it is tested. An unused point in a building of this age may be capped at the visible end while the branch behind the wall is still live, or it may be dead back to a supply that was disconnected decades ago. Either way it needs a pressure test and a licensed eye before anything is connected to it. In these blocks that is a small job and it is not optional.

It follows the same line as everything else: pipework serving only your lot is generally yours, and the incoming service and anything on common property is generally the owners corporation's. Because the gas supply into these buildings is usually a single service, more gas work here lands on the corporation than people expect. We establish it and put it in writing so the right party is billed and the committee has something to act on.

On every gas job, and you should not accept work without one. A Certificate of Compliance is the licensed fitter's declaration that what was done meets the standard. Your insurer will want it. In a block it matters more than usual, because it is also the record the owners corporation needs showing that work on or near common property was done properly. Keep it with the strata papers as well as your own.

A leak test and make-safe is $200 to $450. Connecting an appliance to an existing, adequate point is $250 to $550. Running a new point within your own lot is $450 to $1,200 depending on the distance and what has to be opened up. Establishing what supply is actually available to a flat, and whether it is common property, is $180 to $350 and is the thing worth paying for first. Every job includes the compliance certificate.