Plumbers & electricians in Camberwell

Camberwell Green sits at the centre, with Denmark Hill climbing south past King’s College Hospital and the Maudsley. Around that junction stand two very different kinds of housing. Camberwell Grove, Grove Lane and Addington Square hold Georgian and early Victorian terraces, tall and narrow, most of them long since split into flats with bathrooms fitted into rooms that were never designed for them.

Turn a corner and the picture changes. Camberwell was rebuilt heavily after the war, and a great deal of the housing here is council built: low rise blocks, slab blocks and towers put up from the nineteen fifties onwards, a good share of it now privately owned. The Peckham side of SE5 tells the same story.

That mix is why two jobs on neighbouring streets have little in common. A blocked drain Camberwell side of the Green might sit behind a terrace older than the railway or under a nineteen sixties block, and the flat upstairs may have no boiler in it at all.

Storage heaters, and why the flat is warm at breakfast and cold by nine at night

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A lot of the flats built here after the war went up with no gas supply to the dwelling. Everything is electric: night storage heaters in the rooms, an immersion heater in a cylinder for the hot water. A storage heater is a stack of dense ceramic bricks wrapped in insulation with an element buried inside. Overnight, while the cheap rate runs, the element charges those bricks to several hundred degrees. Through the following day the bricks let the heat back out. That is the whole machine, and nothing in it makes heat on demand.

Which is why the flat behaves as it does. The heaters are full at seven in the morning and generous while nobody is home, then spent by the time the evening turns properly cold. Turning them up at nine at night achieves nothing, because there is no heat left in the brick to give. The only thing that answers is the boost element, and that draws full price electricity at the worst hour of the day. Running cost is settled by the meter and the tariff far more than by the heater. Storage heaters on a single rate tariff mean paying peak price for heat made at three in the morning, and since the old radio teleswitch signal was retired many meters have needed changing to hold an off peak rate at all.

After that there are three honest routes. Modern high retention units keep their charge and have real controls, so the heat arrives in the evening instead of leaking into an empty room, and on the electrical side they are close to a straight swap. Where the block has a gas riser and a supply that can be brought into the flat, a boiler and a wet system become possible, though that means a meter, a flue route the freeholder will accept and pipework run through a decorated home. Heat pumps suit the low flow temperatures a new system can be designed around, but in a block that is a decision for the building rather than one flat. Which route fits depends on the incoming supply, the consumer unit, whether gas reaches the building at all and what the lease permits.