@neil i wish i knew anyone in my life that i could use that in and get a laugh

@neil and lo, Layer 8 was discovered by a discerning Tech Lawyer whilst taking fire one cold morning.

Once played paintball in near freezing conditions. Never will again.
@neil

@neil I would hope so, gas explosions are no fun. Here in Germany they come with sirens and stuff. We had a leak a few years back just before the coldest weekend of that winter and yeah, no heating that weekend. I think it was 2021-2022.
I hope, it's just smelling from somewhere else and doesn't come back.

@neil faking gas leak to avoid the freeze? Well played Neil, well played...😆

@neil @greem

There's sometimes a gas test nipple on the outlet side of the gas valve in older boilers (used to set the burner pressure). If that hasn't been tightened after testing then the system will pass a pressure drop test (soundness test) but will let gas out when the boiler is running.

Other causes, in newer boilers, can include the boiler failing to light and retrying. Each time it happens it blows unburnt gas out of the flue which could make it's way back into the garage.

@neil That was something that went pop on ours, too, and it turned out (eventually) to be water damage that caused it.

Stay safe and I hope you get no further problems.

@neil @greem was anything using gas at the time?

I had a leak on my incoming isolater but it only seemed to happen when something was running.

thankfully the person that came out was very through and managed to figure out what was happening.

Also because it was the isolater on the incoming it was on the gas company to sort out rather than down to me.

The gas emergency people don't mess about

@neil is your recently repaired boiler in the garage?

We went through a series of failures with our boiler (years ago) that turned out to be a badly corroded heat exchanger core, leaking water into the fire box. That caused all sorts of problems, including some release of gas when it partially quenched the flame while running.

It was more noticeable outside than in, though.

(Also any leak tends to get attention really quickly as people don't like their houses blowing up)

@neil A true Schrödinger's situation. Good that they've not found a fault. But at the same time, bad they've not found the fault.

Was the engineer able to determine the smell was definitely gas and not just something that happened to smell the same? I'm really clutching at straws here but sometimes cut up onions smell a bit like gas to me.

Anyone secretly preparing dinner on your lawnmower, or using the strimmer to whip up a salad?

@neil Yeah, people complain that "nothing works any more" in the UK, but one thing that does still seem to work, in my experience as well as yours, is the speed of response to a report of a gas leak. On a good day it's minutes rather than tens of minutes.

@neil what do they do in this instance? Cap the supply until you get an engineer to fully investigate or are they happy to leave you connected?

Our CO alarm went off a few years back and they capped us until we could get a gas safe engineer out to investigate (again finding nothing). Those were 3 days of some freezing temps in the house.

@neil Is there anything in your garage that could have leaked? Camping stove, weird solvent that's evaporated etc.?

I once had a weird smell outside for days, couldn't find the source, this was more solvent than gas admittedly. It eventually went. Weeks later I found an empty split bottle of white spirit deep in the garage, liquid evaporated. The smell had carried in a really odd direction.

@neil pipework rather than boiler, I guess.

Or weird smelling soil. The gas board dug up our road in London countless times, because there was an area that often smelt of gas but they never found anything - in the end I think they put it down to funny smelling dirt.

@neil Eek. Where does your supply pipe run before it hits the meter? Could the leak be upstream of the point the engineer isolated your boiler?

I'm sure you've already thought of this but it's where my mind went..

@neil any way it could have leaked in from a neighbouring property?

@neil @dan uh oh, sorry to hear.

I hope it gets repaired quickly!

@neil Gas gas or airsoft gas?

@neil
Oh that's not good, on the coldest day of the year so far.

Is it related to your boiler fault? Or is it a new and excitingly-independent gas leak?

@neil ... And you'll still be cold :-(