Plumbers & electricians in Blackheath

The heath sits in the middle of everything, with the village and the station on its southern edge, Westcombe Park falling away north towards Greenwich and Kidbrooke over to the east. Around the heath the housing is largely late Georgian and Victorian: terraces and villas of two and three storeys in yellow stock brick, the big set back houses on the Blackheath Park side, and the avenues laid out after the railway arrived in 1849.

Kidbrooke reads nothing like that. The Ferrier Estate came down and Kidbrooke Village went up in its place, so a large part of SE3 is now flats and townhouses barely a decade old, plumbed from scratch to modern standards. Between the two extremes sits Westcombe Park, Victorian and Edwardian terraces and semis in yellow and red brick, bays at the front, three storeys in places.

The old stock generates most of the work. A house with a good roof pitch gets converted sooner or later, and a loft conversion here almost always includes a shower room, because that is what makes the new room worth having. The same age shows up underground, where a blocked drain in Blackheath is often the original clay run under a garden with a century of tree roots at the joints.

Why a new loft shower room ends up with nothing behind it

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Almost every unconverted house in this stock works the same way. A cold tank in the loft feeds the cylinder and most of the taps, and the pressure at any outlet is set by one thing only, the vertical drop between the water level in that tank and the outlet itself. A kitchen tap two floors down has seven or eight metres of drop behind it and behaves well. A first floor bathroom has three or four and is noticeably softer.

Convert the loft and the arithmetic runs out. The tank has to move to make room for the bedroom and shower room, and it ends up boxed into a corner or sat on a low platform, level with the new outlets or barely above them. The head is gone. The cold side trickles, and the hot is no better, because the cylinder feeding it is filled by that same tank. A thermostatic valve that wants balanced pressure on both sides has nothing to balance. People assume the shower is faulty. It is not. It is being fed by water with nowhere to fall from.

There are three ways out and each costs something. A pump needs a flooded feed from above, so it usually has to sit low down near the cylinder rather than in the loft, and it cannot rescue a tank left too low to feed it. An unvented cylinder removes the tank and puts the house on mains pressure, normally the best result in a house this tall, but it wants an incoming main capable of the flow, a safe discharge route outside, and a cupboard big enough to hold a cylinder. A combi frees the loft space altogether, though every outlet in a three storey house then leans on one main, and in older streets that main is not always up to it. The waste counts too, because a loft WC means taking the soil stack higher or accepting a pumped one.