Boiler, plumbing & heating engineers in Wandsworth

Heating in Wandsworth

The terraces of Battersea, Balham, Tooting and Earlsfield are the most extended housing stock in London. Side return infill, rear extension, loft conversion — many houses have had all three, which roughly doubles the heated volume of a building whose heating system was designed around a coal fire and a back boiler. The consequences are predictable: a hot water system serving twice the bathrooms it was meant to, radiators added to circuits that were already at capacity, and a boiler on the kitchen wall doing more than it was ever sized for.

What actually solves that is a system designed as a whole rather than patched again. In practice, for a four-bedroom converted terrace, that usually means a system boiler and a properly sized unvented cylinder, new pipework where the old runs cannot carry the flow, and controls that let the loft and the ground floor be heated separately. It is more work than a swap and it is the difference between a house that is warm everywhere and a house with one permanently cold room that everybody stops mentioning.

Along the river in Battersea and Nine Elms the picture is completely different. Much of the new stock is served by communal heating with a heat interface unit in each flat rather than an individual gas boiler, usually maintained under the building's own contract. We would rather tell you that on the phone than take a booking for a visit that will not help. Where a new-build flat does have its own gas boiler, the common issues are pressure loss and controls rather than anything structural.