Gas pipeline routing: the rules an installer must follow inside your home

You do not need to know the standard by number to tell a careful installation from a careless one. The rules are mostly common sense written down, and once you know them you will see them — or their absence — on the wall.

Where it may run

• Along walls, clipped at regular intervals so it cannot sag or swing
• Through walls inside a sleeve, so the pipe is not in contact with plaster or brick
• In ventilated spaces where a leak would disperse, not collect

Where it may not

• Buried in plaster or concrete without a sleeve
• Through a bedroom or an enclosed space with no ventilation
• Behind or above a heat source — a hob, an oven, a geyser
• Alongside electrical cables without separation
• Through a lift shaft or duct shared with other services

Protection

Where the pipe could be knocked — low on a wall, near a door — it should be guarded. Where it passes through a wall it is sleeved. Where it changes direction it uses proper fittings, not a forced bend that kinks the pipe.

Valves

An isolation valve at the meter is the supplier's. Another near the appliance is the installer's, and it should be reachable without moving furniture. Every appliance gets its own.

Labelling and access

Valves should be identifiable. Joints should be visible or accessible, never sealed away where they cannot be soap-tested later.

If your line runs through a bedroom, is plastered into a wall with no sleeve, or has a joint you cannot get to, it was not installed to standard. That does not mean it is leaking today. It means it should be inspected and, where needed, re-routed — before it is a problem rather than after.

The point of the rules

Every one of them exists so that a leak, if it ever happens, is small, findable and disperses instead of collecting. A line that follows them is one you can stop thinking about. That is what you are paying for.