Upgrade work FAQs

We’ll do our best to keep customers informed. After all, the work we are planning is for your safety. We’ll share project information on one.network, on our Twitter channel, local press and radio, and through letters and leaflets directly to you and your local community.

We urgently need to replace these old gas mains and while there is no ideal time to carry out the work, the timescales have been agreed with the local council and other interested parties. These are essential works required to ensure the continued safety of local businesses and residents.

Our hours of work are agreed with the local authority and may involve working up to seven days a week. We are mindful of people who live in the area and will try to minimise noisy activities where possible.

If your home or business has a gas supply, we’ll need to test and possibly replace the small service pipe to your property, and maybe even move your gas meter. We’ll always try to keep your meter in the same location, with relocation being our final option. This may mean some excavation within your garden or driveway.

We work closely with local authorities and highways teams to explore all potential traffic management options and we’ll always use the least disruptive option where it is safe to do so.

A road closure may be the most suitable option due to a number of reasons such as the width of the road we’re working in, or the depth and location of our pipes. It may also not be safe or legal to allow vehicles to access around our working area.

We’ll always provide advance notification if we need to use temporary traffic lights or close a road.

This is not possible due to legal requirements for road surfaces.

Emergency access will be maintained and we provide emergency services with advance notice of our roadworks and access arrangements.

Some on street parking in your road may be restricted to ensure certain stages of our work can be completed safely, but you’ll be able to access your driveway or garage at all times unless previously agreed with you. We’ll let you know when this is necessary, as your co-operation in keeping sections of the road clear helps keep our work on schedule.

We may need to take up space in the road or on the verge for a site storage area for our equipment. We’ll restore any areas we’ve disturbed as quickly as possible after the project is finished. We’ll also make good all road surfaces, pavements and driveways.
 

If our work affects local bus services, this will be advertised in advance. Please check with your local bus company.

We put barriers around, or walkboards over, any holes we dig to keep everyone safe while we replace the mains. If it’s a long section of pipe we’ll need to use a fair number, but we’ll do all we can to avoid blocking driveways and footpaths unnecessarily.

There are many reasons why you may not see our engineers on site, including waiting for road resurfacing to set, mandatory breaks, and other activities taking engineers away from site, such as health and safety paperwork and local gas pressure testing.

Some of our work may require deep excavations and it is unsafe for our engineers to complete this at night. We may also need to make connections to properties as we carry out our work and we would not be able to do this during the night. We also know many communities do not like noise and disruption when work takes place at night.

We want to keep gas live for residents while we work on installing new mains. To do this, we carry out tests on our network to check the maximum lengths of our pipes that can be disconnected at any one time and still allow enough gas to provide surrounding areas. Having more engineers working at the same time on different sections would mean we could not continue to provide a reliable gas supply to your community.

The last thing we want to do is add to a stressful situation, so contact our Customer Service team or speak to one of our on site engineers and we’ll try our best to put special arrangements in place for you. 

In most cases we’ll need to disconnect your supply for a while, but we’ll let you know the date by dropping a card through your letterbox five days in advance.

Yes, as we’ll need to get into your property so we can carry out safety checks on all your gas appliances, and relight your boiler.

If you’re not in, we’ll leave you a contact card so you can call to arrange for an engineer to come out as soon as possible, or you can speak to our on site engineers who will arrange it for you.

If we have to dig anywhere on your property, we’ll restore areas of tarmac, paving or grass we’ve disturbed, matching it as closely as we can to the original. New surfaces may take a while to blend in with older, more weathered areas, so please bear this in mind.

Replacing fossil fuels with green alternatives is the most pressing challenge facing the UK’s energy system. To meet the ambitious net zero carbon emissions targets set by the UK and Scottish Governments, sectors like heating and transport must decarbonise: transitioning away from using fossil fuels like natural gas and diesel to zero-carbon alternatives like hydrogen and biomethane.

Almost 85% of UK households use gas for heating, so adapting our existing networks to use green hydrogen will allow us to decarbonise faster and further than the alternative. Our team of researchers, engineers, economists and energy experts are striving to deliver a suite of innovation projects that will help make hydrogen the backbone of the UK’s future gas network.

You can find out more about how we’re innovating for decarbonisation here.