North-east Fife residents have been skimping on heating during freezing conditions amid a UK-wide shortage of gas supplies.
Temporary refinery closures and bad weather have meant householders relying on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) have been left waiting for deliveries.
Jane Kell, project manager of St Andrews Environmental Network, said: “There are a lot of properties in north-east Fife that rely on LPG.
“For people living in isolated, historic, stone-built and hard-to-heat properties, being without gas can be significant for them, especially as a lot of them have gas cookers.
“A couple I was speaking to yesterday had been rationing gas for six weeks. As you can imagine, it has been causing hardship for residents.”
George Young from St Andrews Pottery depends on gas supplies to run his business, with the kiln at the Blebocraigs workshop run on LPG.
“We’re OK at the moment, but I’m going to speak to my supplier to see if there has been a problem,” he said.
“I’m a potter and use gas to fire the kiln. It uses about 8% of the tank every time, so the tank goes down quite quickly.”
Mr Young recently had a telemetry device fitted to his gas tank, which prompts an alert when levels get low.
North East Fife MP Willie Rennie warned that telemetry systems were not foolproof.
“With the telemetry communications system many customers automatically receive gas when their tanks reach certain level so the current shortages will go unnoticed,” he said.
“The LPG delivery companies need to be communicating directly with customers about this rather than customers suddenly discovering they have no gas.
“With the winter weather still with us customers need to plan and prepare but they can’t do that if they are not told.”
Calor said it was working through a delivery backlog now that local refineries were back up and running and an issue with a pipeline which had affected supplies had now been resolved.
A Calor spokeswoman said the company was prioritising deliveries to those who were vulnerable.
“Otherwise, if a customer is currently out of gas, it should get to them within three days of they are a telemetry customer.
“If they are out of gas and they phone now, and they are not a telemetry customer, it’s going to take up to 10 days.”
