Boiler, plumbing & heating engineers in Hillingdon

Heating in Hillingdon

Hillingdon is Metroland at its most complete. The railway pushed out from Baker Street, the fields either side of it were sold off between the wars, and the result is street after street of 1930s semi-detached houses through Ruislip, Ickenham, Hillingdon and North Hayes. Those houses were built with a coal fire in the front room and no central heating at all. Everything in them now — the boiler, the pipework, the radiators — was retrofitted by somebody at some point, and the quality of that retrofit is the single thing that decides whether a system works.

What we open up most often is a system that has been extended rather than designed. A back boiler went in during the seventies, a wall-hung boiler replaced it in the nineties on the same undersized pipework, a kitchen extension added two radiators on a spur, and now the far end of the house never gets warm. That is not a broken boiler. It is a system that has outgrown its pipe sizes, and telling the difference before anyone spends money is most of the job.

The southern half of the borough is different again. Hayes, Yiewsley and West Drayton carry a lot of interwar terraces and postwar council-built stock, much of it now privately let, and a steady flow of new flats around Stockley Park and the Hayes canalside. Small flats mean combi boilers in tight cupboards with awkward flue runs; the older lets mean landlord certificates, and a lot of our winter work in UB3 and UB7 is exactly that.