How do I increase my gas supply volume to a large capacity supply?

Hi there @bonjourpaul and welcome to the OVO Forum! :)

We can definitely try to answer this one for you, but I could do with having a few snaps of your gas meter. This helps us to work out which one you’ve got and we can then (usually) grab the datasheet for that model. Transparent usually takes Wednesday’s off, so I can’t ask for his thoughts today, but he’ll probably see this thread when he next checks in.

If you could upload a few photos of your gas meter in your next reply, that would be great.

Thanks!

Thx Blastoise much appreciated. Looking for options - photos should be above any other info please let me know. 

Great question this one, @bonjourpaul - and one that’s not been covered in depth here before.

It sounds like you’ve already done some research as you’re nearly spot on in terms of the capacity of a standard gas supply. The standard gas meters (also known as G4/U6 meters) have a maximum output of 64.6 kWh, in order to confirm that your current supply will need an upgrade you’ll need a gas safe engineer to calculate your ‘Service Pipe Energy  Value’ (SPEV) in kWh which covers the total amount of gas used by all appliances (or planned appliances) in your home. If the standard gas meter isn’t going to be able to supply enough to fire up all the planned appliances, you’ll need to upgrade to a G10/U16 gas meter. These ones have a maximum capacity of 172.3 kWh.

How does a U16 upgrade work?

It’s a bit of a long process as we’re not the only party that need to be involved. To summarise, the process for upgrading to U16 is:

• We send the SPEV information (the max load capacity required by your home) to your gas transporter, via a GT1 form
• The transporter perform a service upgrade to incoming pipework if necessary
• You may need to have a new meter box (kiosk) fitted (the U16 meters are larger than standard meters and might not fit in your current meter box)
• National Grid Metering replace the meter for free for a U16 meter (there might be a site-survey cost to pay - see more here)
• You’ll need to organise a gas-safe engineer to connect up the pipework afterwards

Hope this helps outline the steps which need to be taken. Have you already had the ‘SPEV’ confirmed? 

No worries, these are absolutely perfect. :)

I can definitely confirm that your gas meter is a SMETS1 Secure Liberty EG4v 10, so your electricity meter right now is almost certainly a SMETS1 Secure Liberty 100 (or another one in the Secure Liberty 1xx family).

I’ve never seen anyone ask this question before myself, but luckily I did manage to find an existing question that’s somewhat related.

It’s quite likely that a Meter Exchange (MEX) will be needed to upgrade your gas supply. I can’t seem to find any calculators that can help do the number crunching, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d need to get an upgrade or two on the supply. There may be a charge for this service. I’ve grabbed the jobs list for you so you can get an idea.

In theory, I think the MEX from U6 to U16 job sounds like the closest match, but I might not be on the right one. What I can say is that if I am on the right track, the MEX itself might be free but you’ll probably need a Site Survey. Worst case scenario is that you could end up paying for a few jobs that would need doing. I’m afraid I can’t identify exactly what they are and I wouldn’t be able to give you a proper quote as I don’t have the authority to do that as a forum volunteer. But I can try to give you a rough guess.

Assuming that the MEX turns out to be chargeable and a paid Technical Site Survey is also needed, you could be looking at £106 for the MEX itself and £106 for the Technical Site Survey - assuming that the Site Surveys for Gas cost the same as the Site Surveys for Electricity. You might potentially be able to get away with only paying for one of the two, but I don’t know for sure.

It is also possible that your Electricity Meter might need to be replaced as well, especially if the new Gas Meter would be SMETS2 since you can’t mix S1 and S2 kit - it won’t work!

If you’re happy to go ahead with this, I’d definitely suggest giving the Support Team a call and discuss it with them. If you let the team know about this thread and tell them that Blastoise186 has already given you some advice on the OVO Forum, that will speed things up a little. My name is a bit of a secret password, in a way. 

And then it turns out Jess beat me to it! XD

Thx all.  That larger meter would cover it and give us all the options we would need. 
 

My next question is - how would I know if my current pipe would take this larger meter / cubic delivery ? 
 

Is this a simple calculation based on my pipe diameter ?

I am in a small close and at the back of the close which is private. I would really like to avoid digging up all the way to the road due to both due to the costs and making good afterwards. 
 

thx again. 

For the sake of others who come across this topic at a later date, I’d like to clarify the above comments.

There are two completely separate issues being mentioned here.

a: A Medium-pressure gas main is one that operates up to 2 Bar pressure. They are normally used to interlink towns on the Local Distribution Zone - the gas equivalent of the regional Distribution Grid for electricity.

Within a town the pressure is reduced to 75mBar which serves our houses.

In some locations there is no low-pressure pipe. Connection is therefore made to a Medium-pressure pipe  using a special meter. That’s what’s described in the topic about the Medium pressure Supply.

b: The question is this topic relates to the need to obtain a larger than normal gas supply from a standard Low-Pressure pipe.

It’s that issue which @Jess_OVO answered by referring to the U16 meter.