In my last post, I wrote that installing a heat pump was the penultimate phase of our home decarbonisation project. So what was the final phase?
Getting the gas meter taken away.
Since the gas boiler was removed and the gas pipe that supplied it was capped, the reading on the gas meter had not moved (of course), but we were still paying the standing charge for having the meter. I contacted my energy supplier, Octopus Energy, to remove it.
I hear that some companies charge for this service, but being one of the most vocal proponent of electrification (kudos to them!), Octopus do it free of charge.
So after a couple of weeks, their brightly coloured pink/purple-liveried, green-plated electric van arrived, and an engineer spent five minutes to take away the meter.
It’s interesting that they only remove the meter itself and leave the dirty old box and the capped standing pipe in place, which seems pointless. I hear (from someone on Bluesky so not personally verified) that they wait for a year to make sure that nobody asks to reconnect to gas supply before capping the supply at the street level, at which point the pieces within the property’s boundaries can be removed. I shall wait and see.
In the meantime, we bought a bottle of Champaign and toasted for the completion of our home decarbonisation project – a bottle that apparently contains five litres of carbon dioxide in the form of lovely, lively fizz, but at least there will be no more CO2 coming out of the flue.