Ever since I moved into my house six years ago, I’ve casually noticed the occasional smell of gas outside my front door. Sometimes I believed I could smell gas in my downstairs toilet which is adjacent to the inlet pipe. However, it’s not been frequent or predictable enough to convince me to call out Transco to investigate.

But today I could clearly smell gas in the toilet, so I decided to get the engineers in.

They quickly discovered that the initial installation performed when my house was built 11 years ago hadn’t been completed correctly. This was fixed by screwing on the ‘top’ of the inlet pipe which was loose.

The staggering thing was that their equipment didn’t register a leak into the house as it was less than one part per million, but I could clearly smell it.