Boiler, plumbing & heating engineers in Ealing

Heating in Ealing

Ealing earned the name Queen of the Suburbs because it was built early and built well: large Edwardian and late-Victorian houses around Ealing Common, Ealing Broadway and Hanwell, generously proportioned and generously draughty. A great many of them have been divided into flats, and conversions are where the interesting problems live. One gas supply feeding three or four separate boilers, a meter position that suits nobody, a flue that has to clear a window it never used to be near — these are design questions, not repairs, and getting them wrong is expensive.

In the houses that stayed whole, the constraint is hot water rather than heat. A four-bedroom Edwardian house with two bathrooms and a loft conversion asks more of a hot water system than a combi boiler can deliver, no matter how big the badge on the front says it is. That is why so much of our Ealing work is unvented cylinders — a Megaflo or similar, sized to the number of outlets, with the incoming main checked first because a beautiful cylinder fed by a tired lead service pipe still gives a poor shower.

Then there is the north and west of the borough. Northolt, Greenford and parts of Southall are largely postwar, with a lot of 1960s and 1970s microbore pipework — eight or ten millimetre copper that silts up with sludge and slowly strangles the radiators furthest from the pump. Those systems respond very well to a proper power flush and very badly to a new boiler dropped onto dirty pipework, which is the single most common way to waste money on a heating system.