Boiler, plumbing & heating engineers in Tower Hamlets

Heating in Tower Hamlets

Tower Hamlets has the largest concentration of flats in tall buildings in the country, and height genuinely changes the engineering. Above a certain level the flue arrangements available to an individual gas boiler become limited, which is why so many blocks here use communal heating with a heat interface unit in each flat instead. Those units are not gas appliances, do not need a gas safety certificate, and are usually maintained under the building's own contract. We say so on the phone rather than attending, because there is no honest reason to charge for that visit.

Where there are individual gas boilers in blocks, the arrangements are frequently vertical shared flues, and those bring their own regime: inspection hatches, checks that cannot be done from inside a single flat, and a duty on the building owner that individual leaseholders often do not know exists. A proper safety check on that kind of installation is a different piece of work from a check on a house, and skipping the difference is exactly the wrong economy.

Then there is the older Tower Hamlets — the Victorian terraces of Bow, Bethnal Green and Mile End, many converted, and a rental market as busy as any in London. That is conventional work: boiler replacements, repairs, flushing and certificates, in buildings a century and a half old with all the pipework surprises that implies.