Boiler, plumbing & heating engineers in Hackney

Heating in Hackney

The Victorian terraces of Stoke Newington, Clapton and Dalston have been divided and redivided for decades, and the heating in them reflects every stage of that history. It is entirely normal to find a boiler in a bedroom cupboard, a flue running through a void nobody can quite account for, and pipework that passes through a neighbouring flat on its way somewhere. Our first job in a building like that is to establish what is actually there, because the drawing in somebody's head rarely matches what is behind the plasterboard.

Hackney also has one of the largest concentrations of ex-local-authority housing in London, and those flats behave differently from converted ones. They were built with generous, well-planned pipework and often with communal systems since converted to individual boilers. The systems are usually sound; what they need is balancing, decent controls and, on the older ones, a flush. Replacing a working boiler in a block like that is frequently the most expensive way to not fix the problem.

The rental market here is large and turns over quickly, which makes landlord certificates and end-of-tenancy checks a regular part of the diary. The useful version of that visit is one where the tenant is actually in, so we work evenings and Saturdays. We do not work nights, and we would rather say that clearly than take a booking we cannot keep.