Gas Fireplace Service near you

Act first and diagnose later. The Victorian Department of Health advises that if you suspect you may be affected by carbon monoxide from a gas appliance, you immediately turn it off and open the doors and windows to ventilate the area, leave the property keeping the doors and windows open if possible, and seek medical advice immediately, and that in an emergency you call 000. The symptoms to take seriously are tiredness, shortness of breath, headaches, dizziness, nausea, weakness, confusion or chest pain, and the pattern that should worry you most is several people, or people and pets, becoming unwell at the same time or only when they are at home.

Then keep the appliance off. Energy Safe Victoria's instruction about a heater you are worried about is short: do not use your heater until you have had it checked by a qualified gasfitter. A gas fireplace is rarely the only heating in a house, and going without it for a week is not a meaningful hardship measured against what carbon monoxide does.

If what you can smell is gas rather than something you suspect is carbon monoxide, get people out of the building first and call for help from outside. Energy Safe Victoria's general advice on gas is that it is inherently dangerous and that consumers must always use a licensed or registered gasfitter, and for life-threatening emergencies it directs people to call 000. Do not try to find the leak yourself, and do not relight the appliance to see whether the smell comes back.

Energy Safe Victoria sets out what a gas safety check covers, and it is a useful list to hold a quote against: carry out a gas fitting line test to check for gas leaks, inspect the gas appliance installation to identify safety-critical non-compliances, and complete a service of all the gas appliances. In Victoria the service work must be reported to the Victorian Building Authority on its online gas servicing portal, so the visit leaves a record beyond your invoice.

The part homeowners have most often never heard of is the spillage test, and for a gas fireplace it is the important one. Energy Safe Victoria's checklist says open-flued gas space heaters and indoor open-flued water heaters should be tested for spillage of combustion products with all extraction systems running, and that room-sealed appliances and ducted heaters should also be tested for spillage of combustion products due to cracks in heat exchangers. Its guidance on negative pressure testing explains the reason: the sealing of buildings to achieve higher energy efficiency, coupled with the increased use of extraction fans such as high capacity rangehoods and exhaust fans, can adversely impact the safe operation of internal open-flue gas appliances, leading to carbon monoxide spillage. Testing has to be carried out in four stages and in a set order, otherwise you will not know whether the fault lies with negative pressure when extraction fans are operating or with the appliance itself.

The timings in that guidance are specific to appliance type, which is why a gas fireplace is not tested like a wall furnace. Spillage is checked 5 minutes after ignition if the appliance is a gas space heater, an indirect gas-fired ducted air-heater or a Type 2 decorative-effect gas heater, and 10 minutes after ignition if it is a Type 1 decorative-effect heater installed in an existing fireplace. Ask which category your appliance falls into and ask for the results in writing, because a service record listing the tests carried out and the readings taken is worth far more than an invoice that says serviced.

There is no homeowner exception anywhere in Australia for opening up a gas appliance. Energy Safe Victoria states that gas and electricity are inherently dangerous and that it is illegal and potentially fatal for unlicensed and unqualified people to undertake any gasfitting or electrical work, and that homeowners and consumers must always use a licensed or registered gasfitter. New South Wales requires a licence or certificate to do any plumbing, draining or gasfitting work regardless of the cost of the work, with gasfitting work defined to include the installation, alteration, extension or repair of a gas installation and work on any flue. Queensland requires a licence or authorisation before you do any gas work at all, regardless of whether the work is residential, commercial or industrial, and defines gas work as any work involved in installing, removing, altering, repairing, servicing, testing and certifying the gas system of a gas device.

For servicing specifically, Victoria adds an endorsement worth checking on the card in front of you. Energy Safe Victoria advises that all registered and licensed plumbers are issued with a photo identification card listing the type of work they can do, that you should ask to check the licence card and the registered classes listed on the back, and that to conduct routine servicing and carbon monoxide checks the licence needs to show the gas servicing Type A accreditation. The Victorian Department of Health frames the same requirement from the health side, advising that all types of gas heaters, including central heating units, space heaters, wall units and gas log fires, be serviced a minimum of every two years by a licensed gasfitter who has completed training on detecting and correcting risks of carbon monoxide spillage. In Queensland, a QBCC gasfitting licence covers installing, commissioning, maintaining, testing, altering, repairing and servicing a gas system in any building, and the holder must also hold a gasfitting occupational licence issued by the Chief Gas Examiner and Resources Safety and Health Queensland.

LokalMatch is the step that finds you one of those people. You describe the appliance and the symptom once, saying whether it sits in an old fireplace or is a self-contained unit, roughly how old it is, when it was last serviced and whether anyone has felt unwell, and matched gas businesses covering your area contact you directly. Those businesses pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not service gas appliances, does not set or quote prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend any business, so asking to see the licence card and the Type A endorsement when the gasfitter arrives is yours to do. If you suspect carbon monoxide or can smell gas, follow the safety advice first and post the job once everyone is safe.

Know which document does what. A compliance certificate belongs to installation work: Energy Safe Victoria states that after installing a gas appliance the licensed gasfitter must give you a compliance certificate, that your copy protects you if problems arise later due to faulty installation, and that being offered a cheap job excluding the cost of the certificate is an offence under the Building Act 1993. Queensland's equivalent is the gas system compliance certificate, which the licence holder issues to the owner or operator of the system on completing an installation, and in Western Australia the submission of Notices of Completion is a requirement of the Gas Standards (Gasfitting and Consumer Gas Installation) Regulations 1999.

A service, by contrast, should leave you with a service record: what was tested, the spillage test results, the readings, what was adjusted or replaced and the date. That record is what tells the next gasfitter whether a marginal result has been drifting, and in Victoria it is backed by the requirement that service work be reported through the Victorian Building Authority's online gas servicing portal. If you rent the property out, ask your state regulator what records you are obliged to keep, because the requirements are not uniform across Australia.

The consumer guarantees sit underneath both. The ACCC explains that the basic rights covered by consumer guarantees cannot be taken away by anything a business says or does, that service providers must carry out all services using an acceptable level of care and skill, and that services must be supplied within a reasonable time if there is no agreed time frame. A business that services an appliance carelessly is answerable for the service regardless of what the appliance manufacturer's warranty says.