SM6 · 3.5 miles from our base
Plumbers and heating engineers in Wallington, SM6
We are a plumbing and heating firm based on Highbury Avenue in Thornton Heath, and Wallington sits 3.5 miles south west of us. We have no branch in SM6 and will not imply otherwise, so our engineers drive over, normally down Stafford Road or across on the A232, which on an ordinary weekday is a twenty to thirty minute run. What we bring is knowledge of what sits behind the walls here, from 1790s terraces beside Wallington Green to 1930s semis off Stanley Park Road and rebuilt brick houses on Roundshaw.
The housing here
What Wallington houses are actually built like
Wallington was a hamlet on the River Wandle until the railway arrived in 1847 and the common fields were enclosed in 1853. Everything after that came in four bursts, and each burst left a different plumbing problem behind.
The oldest stock sits around Wallington Green and along Manor Road, which was originally called The Hollow Way. There are terraces here from about 1790 to 1840, including the three houses at Whitehall Place built around 1792 and the red brick terrace at Wrights Row from the same decade. These are solid wall houses with no cavity, shallow foundations and no plumbing designed into them at all. Every pipe in them was added later, which is why supply and waste runs are so often surface clipped, chased into soft lime plaster, or threaded through a cupboard in a way nobody would choose today. Two things catch people out. The internal stop tap is usually in a cramped spot beside the front door or under the stairs and has often seized solid, so a burst here becomes a hunt for the external stopcock in the footway. And because lead was not banned from new UK plumbing until 1970, a house of this age can still have a lead supply pipe running in from the boundary, sometimes with lead tails left under a later copper repair.
The Victorian and Edwardian villas came next, spreading south from the Green in the 1860s and pushing Woodcote Road into being the high street by the First World War. Lavender, Mint and Bernard Roads were laid out in 1907 on the grounds of an older house. The signature of this stock is the two storey back addition. The bathroom usually ended up in that rear wing, sitting over the kitchen, which puts the soil stack on the back elevation and gives you long, shallow horizontal waste runs to the stack. Those runs are the most common cause of a slow or smelly bathroom in this part of Wallington, because the original lead wastes have usually been replaced piecemeal in plastic with the fall guessed rather than measured. Upstairs there is normally a cold water tank in the loft and a cylinder in an airing cupboard, fed by 22mm gravity primaries that once ran to a back boiler in a chimney breast. Converting one of these to a combi is rarely about the boiler. The work is decommissioning the tank, capping the old vent and cold feed properly, and accepting that a gravity system was never pressure tested, so the first time it sees mains pressure it finds every tired joint on the ground floor.
Between the wars the market gardens and lavender fields around the old village were built over, and most of that was finished by 1935. This is the Stanley Park Road, Sandy Lane South and Woodcote Green sort of housing: cavity walled semis and detached houses, kitchen at the rear, cast iron soil pipe on the flank wall, clay drains under the front garden. These are the easiest houses in Wallington to work on. The boiler nearly always wants the kitchen rear wall with a short horizontal flue, and the pipework is regular enough that a full system swap is predictable. The constraint is the side passage: a flue terminal has to sit at least 300mm clear of an opening window or door and needs clearance from any surface it faces, which in a semi with a one metre gap to the neighbour often means a plume management kit or a vertical flue through the roof. Condensate is the other one. There is rarely an internal drain within reach of a rear kitchen wall, so the condensate goes outside, and an outside run wants to be 32mm and insulated or it will freeze and lock the boiler out on the first hard morning in January.
Then there is Roundshaw, which is a category of its own. It was built on the runways of Croydon Airport after the airport closed in 1959, with construction starting in 1965 and the first tenants moving in during August 1967. The original 1,800 homes were pre-cast concrete flats and maisonettes served by centralised heating rather than individual boilers. From 1998 through to 2010 the system built blocks were demolished and replaced with low rise houses and brick flats, while 674 of the existing brick homes were kept and refurbished with new pitched roofs. The practical result is that Roundshaw addresses vary enormously. A rebuilt house from the 2000s will usually have plastic pipework, a sealed system and a combi already. A retained and refurbished property may still have a cylinder and a heating layout inherited from the communal era. We ask for the road name first, because Mollison Drive, Lindbergh Road, Avro Way, Brabazon Avenue and Olley Close tell us more about the plumbing than the postcode does.
Worth knowing
Chalk water, conservation areas and a moving boundary
The most useful local fact about plumbing in Wallington has nothing to do with the buildings. It is the water. This corner of Sutton is supplied by SES Water rather than Thames Water, and the bulk of that supply is drawn from boreholes in the chalk of the North Downs. Rain falling on the downs percolates through the chalk and comes back out as springs at Carshalton and Beddington, which is where the Wandle rises before it runs through Beddington Park and The Grange on its way north. Chalk means calcium carbonate, and SES Water averages around 239 milligrams per litre, roughly 17 degrees Clark. That is firmly hard water, and it changes what goes wrong.
In practice, that is why so many Wallington callouts are hot water faults rather than heating faults. A combi makes hot water through a plate heat exchanger with very narrow waterways, and in this water those waterways scale up. The symptom is a boiler that heats the radiators perfectly but gives a shower that runs warm, then hot, then cold. Immersion elements furr and shower cartridges seize for the same reason, and kettle scale is a fair indicator of what the boiler is coping with. We fit a scale reducer on the cold main feeding the boiler on any combi installation here, because it is a small cost at installation and a large one as a repair later. A magnetic filter does a different job: that catches iron oxide sludge on the heating side and will not touch limescale on the hot water side. Most Wallington properties want both.
The second thing worth knowing is planning. Sutton has fifteen conservation areas and two of them are in Wallington: Wallington Green, designated in 1971 and covering 3.5 hectares in four sub areas including Wrights Row and Whitehall Place, Danbury Terrace and Mews, and Manor Road, and the Holy Trinity area around the church on Manor Road. Cross the eastern boundary and you are into the Beddington Park, Beddington Village, Carew Manor and Church Lane conservation areas. This matters for one specific job. The permitted development right that lets you stick a flue on the outside of a house does not extend to a wall or roof slope fronting a highway when the property is in a conservation area, so a front elevation flue there needs a planning application rather than just a Gas Safe notification. The listed buildings inside the Wallington Green area are all Grade II, and on those, cutting a new flue penetration or running new external pipework is listed building consent territory. None of that blocks the work. It just means the boiler position gets decided at the survey rather than on the morning of the installation. The Wallington Green area is also an archaeological priority area, which only bites on deep drainage excavation, but it is worth knowing before anyone trenches a front garden there.
Third, drainage. The terraces around the Green and the older streets off Manor Road were built long before anyone required a separate drain per dwelling, so shared and combined runs are normal. Since October 2011 most shared drains and lateral drains outside property boundaries transferred to the sewerage undertaker, which for Wallington means Thames Water handles the sewers even though SES Water supplies the fresh water. That split confuses a lot of people when they ring a water company about a blockage. On the interwar streets the usual cause is root ingress into clay drains under a front garden, and on Roundshaw it is more often shared runs between blocks. We publish no fixed price for blocked drains or leak tracing, because rodding a rear gully and running a camera survey with an excavation are not the same job. We quote those on site.
Last, the boundary. Wallington is in the London Borough of Sutton, not Croydon, and it was part of the Municipal Borough of Beddington and Wallington until 1965. Part of Roundshaw sits across the line in Croydon borough, and Bandon Hill Cemetery on Plough Lane, opened in 1900, has been jointly run by both boroughs since then. That changes nothing about the plumbing, but near Plough Lane and Roundshaw it does decide which council answers for a road, a tree or a drain outside your house.
What we do here
Services we cover in Wallington
Blocked drains & toilets
Blocked drains and toilets cleared across Croydon and the CR postcodes. We find the cause, say whether it is yours or Thames Water’s, and price it first.
Boiler installation
New boiler installation across Croydon and the CR postcodes. Combi boilers from £1,950, fixed written price after a survey, Building Control notified.
from £1,950Boiler repair
Boiler repair across Croydon and the CR postcodes. Gas Safe engineers, £110 for diagnosis and labour, and any part priced before it goes in. Call 07534 841885.
£110Boiler servicing
Annual boiler service across Croydon and the CR postcodes, £90. Gas Safe engineers, flue gas analysis, and the Benchmark book stamped so your warranty holds.
£90Central heating
Central heating across Croydon and the CR postcodes. New systems from £3,400, radiator work, balancing, thermostats and TRVs. Gas Safe registered engineers.
from £3,400Emergency plumbing
Burst pipe, active leak or an overflowing toilet in Croydon? We answer 24/7, charge £120 for the call-out and tell you what the repair costs first.
£120Before you ring
Wallington questions
Do you really cover Wallington, or is it outside your area?
We cover it, and we will be straight about the geography. We work out of Highbury Avenue in Thornton Heath, 3.5 miles from Wallington Green. There is no SM6 branch and no van parked in Woodcote Road. For booked work that makes no practical difference. For an emergency it means a drive, so we give you an honest arrival window on the phone rather than a flattering one.
How quickly can you get to SM6 if something bursts?
Our emergency cover runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the call-out is £120. From Thornton Heath the usual route is Stafford Road or the A232, which is twenty to thirty minutes outside peak times and can be forty in the Friday evening crawl. While you wait, the useful thing is to find your stopcock. In the older terraces near Wallington Green it is often beside the front door or under the stairs and is frequently seized, in which case the external stop tap in the footway at the boundary is your fallback.
Why does my hot water go warm then cold, when the radiators are fine?
That is close to a signature fault in Wallington, and it is almost always limescale in the plate heat exchanger of a combi. The water here comes from chalk boreholes and runs around 239 milligrams per litre of hardness, so the narrow hot water waterways scale up while the heating side stays clear, because the heating side recirculates the same water rather than pulling fresh mains through the boiler. Sometimes the exchanger can be flushed, often it needs replacing. A boiler repair is £110 and we will say before we start whether we think the part is recoverable. On a new installation we fit a scale reducer on the cold feed to stop it recurring.
Can I put a boiler flue on the front of my house near Wallington Green?
Possibly, but not automatically. The Wallington Green conservation area was designated in 1971 and covers the Green, Wrights Row, Whitehall Place, Danbury Terrace and Mews and part of Manor Road, and there is a second conservation area around Holy Trinity Church. In a conservation area the permitted development right for flues does not apply to a wall or roof slope that fronts a highway, so a front elevation flue needs planning permission from Sutton Council. If the building is listed, and the listed buildings inside Wallington Green are all Grade II, a new flue penetration also needs listed building consent. We survey for a rear or side termination first, and a vertical flue through the roof is often the cleanest answer.
I have a Victorian house off Manor Road with a tank in the loft. Should I switch to a combi?
Often yes, but it is a flow rate decision, not a preference. We measure the incoming mains flow at the kitchen tap before quoting, because in this stock the limiter is usually the supply pipe rather than the street main. If the flow is good, a combi frees up the airing cupboard and the loft, and installation starts at £1,950. If it is poor, or there are two bathrooms in the back addition, a system boiler and cylinder is the better answer. Either way we budget for an old gravity system meeting mains pressure for the first time, because that is where the surprises live.
How do I know whether I still have a lead water pipe?
Lead was not banned from new UK plumbing until 1970, so anything built before that in Wallington is a candidate, which covers the Green terraces, the Victorian villas and all of the interwar stock. Look at the pipe where it enters the house before the stop tap. Lead is dull grey, soft enough to mark with a coin and has swollen, rounded joints rather than crisp fittings. Responsibility splits at the boundary: the communication pipe from the main to your boundary belongs to the water company, and the supply pipe from there into the house is yours. We replace supply pipes and can usually get a new one in without digging the whole garden.
What do you charge?
Emergency call-out is £120. A boiler repair is £110. An annual boiler service is £90. A gas safety certificate, the CP12, is £75. Combi boiler installation starts at £1,950 and a full central heating system starts at £3,400. Blocked drains and leak tracing have no published price because the work varies too much to quote sight unseen, so we price those on the job before we begin. Our Gas Safe registration is 919881 and can be checked on the register.
I let a flat on Roundshaw. Do you do landlord gas safety certificates there?
Yes. A CP12 is £75 and we do them across Wallington including Roundshaw, Bandonhill and the Woodcote Green side. Roundshaw is worth flagging in advance because the estate is mixed. Homes rebuilt between 1998 and 2010 usually have a straightforward modern combi, while some of the 674 retained brick properties still carry heating arrangements inherited from the original centralised system installed when the estate was built in the 1960s. Tell us the road when you book, because Mollison Drive and Avro Way often need a different amount of time on site.
My drains are blocked and I think I share them with next door. Who is responsible?
Shared runs are normal in the older streets around Wallington Green and Manor Road because those houses predate any requirement for a separate drain per dwelling. Since October 2011 most shared drains and lateral drains beyond the property boundary transferred to the sewerage undertaker, which here is Thames Water, even though your fresh water comes from SES Water. Anything inside your own boundary serving only your property is yours. We clear the blockage first and identify the ownership afterwards, usually with a camera, so you know who to bill for the next one. Drain work is quoted on the job.
When are you available?
We work Monday to Saturday, 7am to 8pm, for booked work such as servicing, installations, gas safety certificates and pipework, and we run emergency cover 24 hours a day for burst pipes, leaks and no heat or no hot water. Call 07534 841885. If you are ringing about an installation it helps to have the make and model of your existing boiler and a rough idea of how many radiators and bathrooms you have, because it lets us give you a realistic figure before anyone visits.
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Need a plumber in Wallington?
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