Plumbers & electricians in Charlton

The village sits high up, around St Luke’s church and the Jacobean Charlton House, with Charlton Park behind it. From there the ground falls north towards the Woolwich Road and the old industrial riverside, now slowly being rebuilt as housing. West of the village the streets run on into Westcombe Park, where the Victorian villas are larger and set further back.

The railway arrived in eighteen forty nine and the hillside filled in behind it with Victorian and Edwardian terraces. Higher and further out the pattern changes to interwar semis and post-war council built housing, and down by the water there are flats only a few years old.

What ties the older stock together is where the gas meter ended up. It went wherever suited at the time, under the stairs, in a hall cupboard, sometimes a front cellar, and a modest pipe ran a short way to a fire and a cooker. Nobody laying it was allowing for a thirty kilowatt appliance at the far end of the house.

Why a Charlton boiler lights, runs for a minute, then drops out

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A boiler can only burn what the pipe will deliver. The main in the street and the meter itself are rarely the trouble. The trouble is the run between them and the appliance, which in these houses is often long, often in fifteen millimetre, and often takes two or three turns to reach the back of the house. It was sized honestly for a fire and a cooker, later perhaps a back boiler, all of which draw far less than a modern combi at full rate. Add the kitchen extension most of these terraces now have and the pipe travels further still.

To the person living there it looks exactly like a broken boiler. It fires, runs a minute or two, then goes out with a lockout light, and it does it in the middle of a bath rather than during heating, because on heating the boiler has modulated down and is asking for less gas. It is worse with the hob lit and worse in cold weather. A boiler repair in Charlton that has already had a gas valve, a fan and a circuit board fitted and still drops out is a strong hint the fault was never inside the boiler.

The test that settles it is not complicated. Standing pressure is read at the meter with nothing running, then the appliance is driven to full rate and the working pressure read at the boiler with the rest of the house lit as well. The drop from meter to appliance should be no more than about a millibar, and the gas rate is timed off the meter and compared with what the manufacturer says that boiler should burn. If pressure falls away under load, or the rate comes up short, the boiler is starved and no part will cure it. What fixes it depends on the property. Often it is a new run in twenty two or twenty eight millimetre on a shorter route. Sometimes no sensible route exists and the meter is better moved nearer the boiler, which goes through the gas supplier, because the meter belongs to them. Worth knowing before a new boiler is ordered, because a new one on the old pipe behaves the same way.