Boiler, plumbing & heating engineers in Harrow

Heating in Harrow

Pinner, Rayners Lane, North Harrow and Harrow Weald were built in one great push between the wars, in the same style, by the same sort of builder, to the same sort of plan. That uniformity is genuinely useful: after enough of these houses you know before you arrive roughly where the pipework runs, what the airing cupboard is likely to hold and which corner the old boiler was put in. It also means whole streets hit the same milestone together — the systems installed in the eighties are now all in their last decade at once.

The classic Harrow job is a conversion rather than a replacement. A house with a tank in the loft, a cylinder in the airing cupboard and a boiler in the kitchen is being run as three separate problems. Turning that into a combi frees a bedroom cupboard and a loft, but only where the bathroom count and the mains flow support it; where it does not, the right answer is a modern system boiler and an unvented cylinder rather than a combi that will disappoint every winter morning. We measure the incoming main before advising, because that number decides the answer and nothing else does.

Stanmore and the north of the borough add larger detached houses, often extended twice, sometimes with a second heating zone that was never properly controlled. Those benefit less from a new appliance than from proper zoning and controls — two zones, two thermostats, a system that is not trying to heat an empty top floor to keep the kitchen warm. It is unglamorous work and it saves more money than most boiler upgrades do.