Despite the popularity of electric boilers and electric kitchen ranges, a lot of people still use gas appliances at home. And whenever there’s an active gas connection at home, there’s always a risk of accidents.
Therefore, if you want to keep yourself and your family safe, you need to practice gas safety at home. The first step to do that is to make yourself aware of gas safety at home, and if you’re here reading this, you’ve successfully taken that step.
To make things easy, we’ve compiled a list of gas safety tips you can follow at home to prevent any accidents. Let’s see what they are.
Maintain Your Gas Appliances
One of the most important gas safety tips is to maintain your gas appliances. Regularly servicing them will not only ensure those appliances’ gas safety at home but also save you from future repair and replacement costs. Not to mention you won’t have to worry about your life being disrupted if some appliance suddenly breaks down.
Besides that, maintaining your appliances makes sure that everything inside it is working efficiently. If there is a potential problem, the gas engineer should be able to catch it early on during one of the maintenance checks. Furthermore, if you happen to be a landlord, getting an annual gas check is a legal responsibility that you must carry out for the safety of your tenants.
Install Carbon Monoxide Detectors
One of the most common gas accidents at home involves carbon monoxide poisoning. This gas is entirely invisible and odourless, which makes it impossible to spot early on. Only when it reaches dangerous levels and you start experiencing serious symptoms, you might realize that there’s something wrong. Some of these symptoms include headaches, dizziness, vomiting, and weakness.
These symptoms are often confused for hangover or common flu symptoms, which is why people tend to ignore them. However, if you inhale too much carbon monoxide, you can even pass out from it. Therefore, one of the best ways to protect yourself from this is to install carbon monoxide detectors in your home.
Carbon monoxide detectors will let you anytime there’s a leak in the house so you can quickly evacuate and call the authorities. Moreover, after installing the detectors, make sure you check them every few months or so to see if they are still operational or not.
Learn to Recognize When an Appliance Needs Servicing
You should also learn to recognize when any individual gas appliance in your home needs servicing. For instance, if you hear a lot of grinding or strange noises coming from your boiler, it’s a sign that something is wrong.
If you spot such signs early, you can get your appliance checked right away and save yourself from a potential boiler explosion. Similarly, you should know the warning signs of any other gas appliances for gas safety at home.
Know Where the Gas Shut-off Valve Is
One of the very, if not the most, important gas safety tips you need to know is where and how to shut off the gas valve in your house. Usually, these valves are located outside the house and might require additional tools as well to turn them off.
However, stopping the gas supply to your house by shutting off this valve can help limit the damage caused by any leak in the house or to a certain appliance that is malfunctioning. Furthermore, turning off this valve does not mean that your house is safe now in the case of a leak. You should always call the authorities and follow their instructions.
Ensure Adequate Ventilation in the House
Ventilation in the house is important for many reasons, such as ensuring there isn’t a build-up of moisture or pollutants that could harm you and the house.
Additionally, ventilation is also important for gas safety at home. As your gas appliances burn, they require that oxygen as well to maintain a balanced level of gases in the house. Otherwise, without any ventilation, the constant burning of gas could lead to other harmful gases, such as carbon monoxide, building up in the house.
Use Your Gas Appliances Properly
While we all love to get inventive and create new hacks at home, it’s best to avoid such ideas when it comes to gas appliances. To ensure gas safety at home, it is important that you use your gas appliances properly and only for their intended purpose.
For instance, if you have a gas heater, just use it for heating a room. Don’t try cooking an egg over it or anything else. Such actions can not only damage your appliance but also cause accidents.
Get Your Gas Appliances Installed and Checked by Gas Safety Registered Engineers
The best thing you can do to ensure gas safety at home is to schedule regular gas safety checks by Gas Safety registered engineers. These engineers have the right technical knowledge and experience to do a thorough check of your home, catch any problems, and repair or replace them the right way.
Final Thoughts
What makes gas so dangerous is that it is often hard to spot if it’s leaking anywhere in the house. You can’t see it, and it doesn’t have a very obvious smell either. Therefore, you can only spot it if you know what you’re looking for or if you have the right tools in place. Fortunately, with these gas safety tips, now you know those signs as well as those measures so you can get started right away.
At Gasify, you will find highly trained, and experienced Gas Safety registered engineers. These guys know everything there is to know about gas safety at home, boiler servicing, gas certificates, and more. Therefore, whenever you have any kind of gas trouble at home, visit our website, and book a session with us right away!