Gas pipe corrosion

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3 Jul 2006
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Prior to having some building work done, I had a gas safe engineer to remove some lead gas pipe and replace with a copper pipe. This was approx 4 weeks ago.

Yesterday my wife thought she could smell gas and when I checked, there was indeed a gas smell and hissing noise close to the meter. I shut off the gas tap and called the emergency gas leak number. The engineer came pretty quickly and with his sniffer and bubbly liquid detected a leak in the pipe between the stop tap and meter. This pipe was a flexible steel pipe and was in contact with the new copper pipe.

The engineer said that flux from the new pipe work was corroding the steel pipe. He replaced the flexi pipe making sure that it was not in contact with the copper and advised me to clean up the flux on the copper pipe.

Obviously this could have been a serious situation if we had not noticed the leak and it concerns me that something like flux which is commonly used in soldering copper pipes could cause corrosion of an adjacent gas pipe.

Should the original gas safe fitter have been aware of this and had he been negligent in allowing this situation to arise?
 
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The wrong flux was probably used. I suspect the installer used an agressive self cleaning flux like powerflow, which is not approved for use on gas as it is 'active' even when cold.
 
Nope even non aggresive flux will cause this the walls are really thin on flexi pipes there was something in the trade mags other week telling people to make sure any flux is cleaned off an no trace of it left on .

This has been a problem for a number of years since they started making them as cheaply as possible
 
I've had this happen to me with Laco. Was really careful but some must have dropped down onto the anaconda.

Thankfully we were still on the job and found the leak in commissioning.

Sometimes stuff just happens.
 
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its a known problem. i always remove the meter, anaconda and cap off. Had it once on a trac pipe install where the installer dropped flux down inside the trac pipe in the screed. Had to renew the lot.
 

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