Boiler, plumbing & heating engineers in Enfield

Heating in Enfield

Southgate, Winchmore Hill and Palmers Green went up in the twenties and thirties along the Piccadilly line extension, and much of the housing is generously sized — bay-fronted semis with three or four bedrooms, long gardens and, very often, a garage that has become a utility room with a radiator added to it. The pattern we see repeatedly is a system that has grown by accretion, one radiator at a time, without anybody ever going back to balance it. The result is a house where the rooms furthest from the boiler run cold and the ones nearest run too hot, and the thermostat sits in whichever room is wrong.

Balancing is the least glamorous work in heating and it is regularly the most useful. Setting the lockshield valves so that each radiator gets its share, checking the pump speed and the system pressure, and fitting controls that reflect how the house is actually used will transform a system like this for a fraction of the cost of a replacement. We say so even when it means a smaller job, because the alternative is a customer who spends four figures and still has a cold back bedroom.

Edmonton and Ponders End are a different picture again: a lot of postwar and ex-local-authority stock, considerable private letting, and a good number of systems with 1970s microbore pipework that has silted up over the decades. Those are the ones where a power flush genuinely earns its money, and where fitting a new boiler onto unflushed pipework is the fastest way to void the warranty on it.