Gas Line Hangers?

and jane, people can still provide advice on hearsay. i do it all the time but i let the audience know that i am not in that field and i might tell them i heard someone say this once. or maybe we used a certain tool or process in one situation and we wonder if we can borrow from one trade and use it in another – but we have to let people know we are speculating (I speculated about the code above). before the internet, when guys like us had an issue with something we would go around asking people things, people we knew who knew someone, and they would say something that they had heard from someone and we would go try it out. sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. the important thing is to understand the risks because a lot of people have been injured or have made expensive mistakes when they did not.

thank you Jane. i am not really trying to give advice here (i admit i do not know the code) but i am trying to use the education levels and professionalism(managerial experience) of the readers on this board, to show them how to take a line of thinking that they might already possess and might follow in their jobs and show them how to apply that in their own houses. I am looking at a much bigger picture of homeownership and applying a management approach to it and trying to convey that here. i am trying to show them how professionals who deal with 100 million dollar properties and thousands of lives use their thinking to avoid catastrophe and i said it above, we contractors (and property managers) do not know everything but when we deal with contractors, we do not have the problems others on this board have because we use a certain line of thinking and we know the questions to ask and we are careful in the selection of the people we choose for the work.

i am confounded that master plumber did not come on here and confirm or deny that a licensed plumber was needed and if he said one was not, i would have said, “ok, but you can not fault someone for taking the cautious approach with a gas line”. as for No Permitz, his screen name and some comments he has made here make it clear of the kind of person he is and i suspect my use of the term “idiot” when i referred to an unlicensed contractor who might do such a job might have offended him and i can think of all sorts of reasons why that might be. as for both of them, i do not think they have the education nor intellectual capacity to comprehend what i was trying to convey to the op and the wider community and it is something that a lot of homeowners need.

keep in mind some differences between someone like me and master plumber. i come on here, in a reply above, and convey what could have been a very expensive and dangerous mistake i almost made (and would have made if my boss did not stop me). i openly share that experience so others can learn from it. a few months back i made a comment like this “a closed loop steam heating system” and master plumber comes out with his guns blazing and says “there is no such thing”. i knew he would do this so i immediately googled “closed loop steam heating system” and found links to it and it was the system i recalled operating in a building i managed, replete with steam traps and (i think) what we called injector pumps that pulled condensate through the system and forced it back into the boilers. i gave him the opportunity to retract what he said. instead, he asked me to describe the system and then told me “you have not told me anything” and he asked more questions trying to get me to back away or trip up. i ended up posting the link to such a system and he still did not acknowledge his mistake. this shows us what kind of person he is, he is quick to openly criticize others and when he is wrong, he fails to accept any responsibility for it and he could have turned that into a learning moment for all by saying “oh, yeah, they have those systems but we don’t see them on high rise buildings, they are in areas where the buildings are spread out wide and they need the pumps to move the condensate” and left it at that. Having worked in buildings, if we encountered someone who behaves like this, we would think very hard before we used them. they would be too difficult and their own “short” comings and insecurities would prevent them from owning and admitting their own mistakes.

I would check with who did your original inspection to see if they will still pass it if the work is not done by a Master Plumber. A lot of companies have clauses that say they need prove of license for the work to be completed or they will not pass it and then you need to get another inspection from another company who can find another reason to fail you.
Maybe not the answer you wanted to hear but that is the situation we have seen happen a few times.

This is not about Steve but have sometimes observed people 1. providing advice based on hearsay or based on reading 2. not deferring to the people here who are qualified and do this daily 3. providing well-intentioned but misleading advice when it’s better to direct the person to an architect, contractor, plumber etc.

I’ve gotten very helpful advice from Master Plumber, Gennady, Ed, Jim etc. If it’s a plumbing question, I trust the plumbers vs. someone else. But how is someone new supposed to figure it out.

Noticed a lot of other long timers on here drop off too

Agree w/ MP – I rarely come on here anymore because of Steve..

doorsbythetinkerswagon, you devalue this forum with your incessant gibberish posting.

Bravo, lesson learned, hence, risk management!!!

rick, i like your language.

Op’s use of the word “building” sounds as if this is a coop or condo and op might be a board member.

years ago, when i was just out of college, i worked for a property management firm and was the site super for a resort condo on the coast of NC. the elevator broke down and i called Dover Elevators and they sent a tech who determined that an element of a circuit board had burned out. they thought it was only one chip or item on the circuit board but said the entire board had to be replaced. it was “expensive” (or so i thought). so i said “‘f it’, its winter and quiet, we have time, and i am going to pull the board and send it to my buddy who serviced computer boards and was going to have him fix it for the cost of lunch and save the HOA a lot of money”. i told the elevator tech what i was about to do and i had already opened the panel and pulled the board. the tech told his boss who called my boss and my boss called me and said “you are working with an elevator. elevators kill people. we cannot take that responsibility and t he HOA’s insurance policy will not cover anything to do with you doing this. throw the board in the trash”. and that was where the board went. had the owners in that community heard that i was trying to save them like $1,000 (i think it was 1300; 2500 or so today) they would have thought that was the greatest idea in the world and would have wanted me to proceed. my unprofessional thinking at that time would have been similar to the thinking of the individual owners, “all the money we can save is money saved”.

that day my boss said what he had said to me was the day i realized that saving money usually does not save money were risk of life and property are concerned. by the time i left that firm, i understood that as a professional or person with fiduciary duty, protecting life and assets and limiting risk is paramount; that is your job.

Let’s not forget that the new law, gas inspection every four years and filing the LL152 is a windfall for all master plumbers in NYC. So they are going to be very detailed about the inspection. It is their job to certify and sign off stating it is safe and up to code. It’s in the best interest of everyone, plumbers , owners and tenants. On average that service is $700, so if you need something as basic as adding hangers that would likely run around $700 depending on the size of the job . In the end this is a small business expense that is a tax deduction on rental income.

to what rick says. there is a good reason why plumbers cost so much and there is probably not a lot they can do about it: i bet their insurance, for even a 3 person operation, equals a down payment on a modest queens house. this is the system we live in and if we all want to thrive safely in it we should work with it and not against it. most of us on here want “laws” that protect people in all sorts of ways while ensuring their dignity and by using a licensed and properly insured person, we help to ensure the protection of a lot more people than just the people living in that building; the neighbors, the employees of the plumber, the children of the plumber’s employees; the guy walking on the street in front of the house, the delivery man pressing the doorbell button to drop off a pizza; living in a civil society is about the big picture.

(my thought is, if op finds some unlicensed person who will do this, that person will not be properly insured either).

my guess is, if those hangers have been missing in that house since day one, op would be assuming less r isk by leaving them off (save for the force of the inspection) than he/she would assume if he brought in some unlicensed and uninsured $50 an hour idiot to work on them (and keep in mind, some handyman charging 50 an hour is not carrying insurance; so maybe a 100 an hour person). any unlicensed person who would touch something like this, if it requires a licensed person, is an idiot.

i had a GC working in a building who once sent me some guy from an unlicensed plumbing contractor (probably people who change and service fixtures) to change a radiator valve in the newly renovated board room of a commercial building. the “plumber” could not free the radiator valve so he took the pipe wrench and began hitting the valve and the wrench deflected and hit the newly painted wall next to the valve. the first time he did it i said, “what are you doing?” the second time he hit it i said “stop”. with each successive blow and further damage to the drywall i got louder and firmer until i yelled “what are you? an idiot?.” and he had the gall to get mad at me for talking to him that way (and his boss was an idiot for sending him out unsupervised). my point is, if some idiot would do something like this in front of the man who approves the invoices, there is no telling what they will do with a gas line for someone who might have limited experience dealing with trades people (i could imagine some idiot leaning a ladder on the very gas line he is there to affix the hangers to; i have seen all sorts of stuff like this happen; all done by idiots). idiots can make real messes of simple jobs (and clever idiots learn to hide their screw ups and they appear years later and the customer suffers. the city is full of them and the job of everyone of us on the board is to make it harder for them to exist by not calling them. that is why this board exists; not only to make homeownership better and more enjoyable experience but to make brooklyn a nice community for all to live in work in.

Since you will have to have the inspection done every four years get it done right by a plumber. That way all future inspections will be easier. I can’t imagine it costing all that much to have hangers installed.

so i checked something with the inspection (something from a third party website) and it said that any deficiencies found during the inspection must corrected and signed off on by a licensed plumber. it did not say that ALL deficiencies had to be corrected by a licensed plumber and perhaps these hangers can be installed by anyone. but that got me thinking, if you call back a licensed plumber to sign off on this, will he want to do that without having done the work himself?

and op and others, i am not here to lecture op. i am raising the questions that op should be asking. and asking questions is important; one reason contractors do not have issues with other contractors in their houses is not because we know it all, but we KNOW the questions to ask and believe me, we avoid a lot of headaches that unknowing homeowners fall prey to. when i worked for people,, we had architects and engineers and expeditors who knew about the codes. we often turned to them for answers. or we would dig into the code (which i do not have the time to do). I am simply here po sing the questions that should be answered by someone else such as master plumber or chris petri or eman. unfortunately, master plumber is like a cop, never around when you need him and all guns blazing when you don’t.

my suspicion is that if an inspection found this and you need “compliant hangers” than a licensed plumber is needed. this kind of thing has all sorts of spacing requirements and that would be something that i guess the city would say only a licensed plumber will know.

i am not sure what the code is where hangers are concerned but the city has gone rabid where gas lines are concerned since a person got killed on 2nd ave a few years back. so until you know what the code is, i would not consider hiring an unlicensed person. you have to consider what can go wrong and how that might happen and how that might play out if someone got hurt or the city or lawyers get involved.

when i say stuff like what i just said above, people think i worry too much. but there is something those same people do not know; i have been working in buildings, for professionals and as a professional since 1980. if you look at what professional managers in commercial real estate or large residential firms worry about and how they approach things like this, they always take the side of caution. especially if lives or their careers are at stake (and this is where homeowners and slum landlords make mistakes; where money is concerned they take a chance as if they were buying a lottery ticket). we (in the business) hear stories all the time about people w ho should not have done something who did it and it went wrong and lawyers got involved. or someone should have done something and did not – and they got fired. the chances of something going wrong here are almost non-existent if a competent person were to do this. Even still, if you are a board member and something did go wrong, the results can be devastating – for you personally. if the code states that these hangers are in fact part of “gas line work” and something went wrong, the result might not be civil action but criminal action and there are three people sitting in jail right now for disturbing a gas line in lower manhattan and one of those people is the landlord who directed the action.

this does not mean you can not have someone else do this, but do your “due diligence”. as i said, i worked in commercial and i once worked for a very large and successful residential property manager and we were always looking for legal ways to save money by using codes and insurance rules in our favor, when they allowed, to do things in house.

all this said, if this was my own house, i would do this myself. but me as a contractor, if you called me right now and offered me $200 an hour plus materials to do this, i would refuse it. even if you held the code up in my face, i might still refuse it as i would be worried about my insurance company.

check the codes and proceed with caution.

wait for master plumber to come on here. he will know.

if people comment to this or say a licensed plumber is needed, i will come back on here as a contractor, and explain why you need that licensed person – how something can go wrong with a contractor (like me) or his/her employee and a simple mistake can became a NY Post headline. let’s wait and see what the code says.