Water and Sand in Gas Pipe. You Need to See This

What happens if you find water and sand in the gas pipe?

We hope this never happens to you. It’s quite rare as we haven’t had found anything like this in the gas pipe for nearly 20 years or so.

Check out this video to see what we did to fix it.

The Issue

There was water in the gas main. So what normally happens is the hot main or the cold main has a leak and it shoots out a little jet. And if that jet hits the copper gas main or the plastic gas main, it starts shooting, slicing a hole through it and then fills the whole thing up with water. So when the customers were trying to use the gas, nothing was working. There ended up being gas in the meter.

So we’ve pulled up all the paving and the sand and you can see in the video that something’s been eating the copper pipe quite badly here and has weakened it out. And you can see where the leak is. The owner just put some tape on it.

The jet of water had spun through and gone under this, so we just cut a whole section out.  It had a massive gouge in it and that’s what filled it up. So we’ll just cut that hot section out that’s been eaten away. And then we’re gonna start blowing out all the gas mains, make sure all the sand and all the water gets out of it and we’ll go from there.

The Pipe

You can see in the video after we cut the pipe out that it’s totally full with sand. You can also see the groove that is cut just by the sand and that rushing around it. It’s a massive holes and it just filled the whole thing up with sand and water. We need to blow it all out now and then sorted it out.

We ran through the compressor back to the meter box and we jerry-rigged it up so we could blast it out. And then right at the very back we can put your thumb over the end of the pipe and just let it blow because all the water’s just sitting in the copper pipe. There’s so much of it so it takes a long time. You can see in the video how we blew it out.

All Fixed

So we’ve had the air compressor up on the roof and because there used to be a solar, which was gas up there. So we’ve blown all the lines out. Each one for the barbecue, the bayonet, everything. Each time we took off a point, water would just be pouring out. And so we just kept going until what came out was really dry air. Then we put in the new pipes, a whole new gas main and a whole new hot main. You can see how the copper’s really been eaten away by something.

We think that the heat of the pipe, because it’s the hot pipe, caused some chemical reaction and made a hole that was spraying off to the side. And then it’s copping  just the underneath of that gas pipe and chewing it out and cutting it through. You can also see that’s where the hot jet was blasting underneath. It’s like a sand blaster, and that’s why it can do such damage and fill it all up.

So, it’s all good now, back on gas. And we’ve tested all the burner pressures and stuff.  So we can fill out all the paperwork and let the gas department know that we have fixed it.

If you need any help with this, please give us a call. We’ll be happy to help.