Plumbers and heating engineers in Coulsdon

We cover it, and it is the furthest area we work to. Coulsdon is about six miles from our base on Highbury Avenue in Thornton Heath, straight down the A23 and Brighton Road, and since the Coulsdon bypass at Farthing Way opened in December 2006 the run is a lot cleaner than it used to be. In normal traffic that is twenty five to thirty five minutes, and we are not going to claim a fifteen minute arrival when we cannot deliver one. For booked work the distance makes no difference at all. For a genuine emergency we tell you on the phone how long we will actually be, and if someone closer can get to you faster we say so.

The same as everywhere else we work, with no distance surcharge. Emergency call-out is £120. A boiler repair is £110. An annual boiler service is £90. A gas safety certificate, the CP12 a landlord needs, is £75. A combi boiler installation starts at £1,950 and a full central heating system at £3,400, both quoted after a survey rather than over the phone. Blocked drains and leak tracing have no published price because the work varies too much to pretend otherwise, so we quote those on the job before we start.

Possibly, but not to any wall you like. The Bradmore Green Conservation Area in Old Coulsdon was designated in 1968 and covers the green, the pond and Grange Park off Coulsdon Road and Marlpit Lane. Inside a conservation area, a flue on a wall or roof slope that fronts a highway is not permitted development, so the straightforward front-elevation flue that would be fine elsewhere needs planning permission here. What usually works is a side or rear wall position, or a vertical flue taken up through a rear roof slope. We check the constraint at survey along with the manufacturer flue clearances to windows, doors, boundaries and eaves, and we give you positions that are actually buildable rather than one that looks neat on paper. If a property is listed, and there are several listed buildings around the old village, there is a further consent to consider and we will flag it.

It might make it worse, and we would want to measure before answering. A combi gives you mains pressure hot water, so it is only ever as good as the incoming main. On the higher ground around Old Coulsdon and Rickman Hill the incoming flow is often the limiting factor, and in older houses there is a second bottleneck in the shape of an original half-inch lead or narrow-bore supply pipe. We gauge static pressure and time the flow at the kitchen tap with the tap fully open. If the flow rate will not support a combi at the temperature rise you need, the honest answer is either to upgrade the supply pipe from the boundary into the house first, or to fit a system boiler with a properly sized unvented cylinder which stores hot water and delivers it at a much better rate to two bathrooms at once. We will tell you the measured number and let you decide.

You have hard water, at around 259 parts per million from SES Water chalk boreholes, so scale is a real and continuing cost rather than a theoretical one. Whether you need a full softener is a separate question. A softener helps everywhere in the house, but it needs a drain connection, a salt supply and an unsoftened drinking tap. For most Coulsdon households the cost effective step is a scale reducer on the cold feed to the boiler plus a magnetic filter on the heating return, which protects the two most expensive parts of the system. If you have already replaced a combi plate heat exchanger or an immersion element once, that is usually the point at which a softener starts to pay for itself.

Very often it is a frozen condensate pipe rather than a boiler fault, and Coulsdon gets more of these than the lower parts of the borough because so much of it sits high and exposed on the downs. A condensing boiler produces acidic water that has to drain away, and on a retro-fitted installation that pipe usually runs outside. If it is 22mm, uninsulated, has a long horizontal run or terminates above a gully grating, it will freeze and the boiler will lock out. Thawing it with warm water gets the heat back the same day, but it will happen again next cold snap. The permanent fix is to upsize the external section to 32mm, insulate it with proper weatherproof lagging, shorten and steepen the run, and terminate below the gully grating or into an internal soil stack where that is possible.

An annual check, and it must be done by an engineer who holds the unvented hot water qualification, which is the G3 ticket. An unvented cylinder is a sealed pressurised store, so it has safety devices that have to be tested rather than looked at: the expansion vessel charge, the temperature and pressure relief valve, and the discharge pipework. Losing the expansion vessel charge is the usual failure, and the first sign is water discharging outside from the tundish pipe or hammering when a tap closes. On Cane Hill Park and the new build at Netherne-on-the-Hill that cylinder usually sits in a first floor or loft cupboard alongside the boiler, so we service both in one visit rather than charging you for two.

Probably not you, and it is worth knowing this before anyone starts quoting. Since October 2011, drains shared between two or more properties, and the lateral drain running from the property boundary to the public sewer, transferred to the water and sewerage company. If the blockage is in that shared or lateral section they clear it and there is no bill to you. What remains yours is pipework inside your own boundary serving only your house. When we attend a blockage in Coulsdon we establish which side of that line it is on before doing chargeable work, and if it is the company's pipe we tell you to call them rather than charging you for it.

Yes. A CP12 gas safety certificate is £75 and covers the annual check every landlord is legally required to have carried out on gas appliances, pipework and flues before the previous certificate expires. We are Gas Safe registered under number 919881, which you or your tenant can check on the register. A lot of the rented stock in Coulsdon is flats over the shops on Brighton Road and around Lion Green Road, where the recurring issue is flue termination and access, so we allow time for it. If you want the annual service done at the same visit that is £90, and doing both together saves the tenant a second appointment.

We work Monday to Saturday, 7am to 8pm, with emergency cover running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For installation work the survey and quote are free, and we come out to look properly rather than pricing off photographs. For a repair, the £110 covers diagnosis and the repair itself. If the part needed is not something we can put right on the visit, we tell you what it costs to fix and what it costs to replace the appliance, and give you the honest comparison rather than steering you towards the bigger job.