Do You Smell Gas?

We have had a bad gas leak in the club rooms for some time which smelt fairly bad when you walked into the club rooms. This leak was eventually pinned down to the second hand gas stove that Lorelle had acquired. It turned out to be a pin hole in a pipe down in the guts of the stove.
Problem was fixed with a new pipe and some money for the gas techs.

During the process of finding of the leak, the gas tech checked other bits and pieces but did not want to know about the gas hot water heater in the toilets. It turns out that this type is well and truly illegal so it is about to be removed. The replacement is to be a Rinnai 26 litre / min instaneous gas water heater which has sufficient capacity to run both showers and the hot water for the kitchen sink as well. We have been told that this heater is very reliable and puts out a lot of very hot water. The current hot water heater in the kitchen will also go.

An executive decision has been taken by El Presidente and a couple of committee members to go ahead with this heater and the fitting there of. We did not have any other options. The cost of the Rinnai is a $1000 plus fitting and piping; $500.

But it all got worse all of a sudden. On Friday we run out of gas even though the big gas cylinder was refilled only a couple of months ago! It seems that there has been a slow leak in a line fitting and that the big old yellow gas stove, despite being checked a couple of weeks ago, had sprung a bad leak in one of the valves. Again the gas boys weren't really interested in fixing the old stove!
So we will be up for a new or replacement gas stove and oven. Dimensions; 900 mm long and about 550 to 600 mms deep if you can help.

We are getting prices on a new stove as well but the prices are in the $1800 to $2000 mark at present. The kitchen needs a set up like this both for Horsham Week, and we don't know how long that will continue, but also for the various Fly-Ins that we hope will eventuate in the future.

We are now playing catch up for a long period where we made do with what we had and it was all slowly deteriorating, so it is going to cost us regardless. It should be remember that the kitchen has returned us a lot of money over the last 20 years or so and a bit of money spent on it for the kitchen staff is well and truly justified.

This entry for the Blog was submitted by Max Hedt.