Plumbers & electricians in Edenbridge

Edenbridge is a market town on the River Eden, close to where Kent meets Surrey, and it has held a market charter since the thirteenth century. The High Street is lined with timber-framed buildings from the late medieval and Tudor years, among them a Wealden hall house in The Square and the house of around fourteen hundred that holds the Eden Valley Museum. The town grew outward through the twentieth century, so behind the old frontages there are streets of later housing, but the centre still reads as a Wealden town rather than a suburb.

Round it the district scatters across the Weald in small settlements. Chiddingstone is a single street of Tudor houses and an inn, owned by the National Trust since nineteen thirty nine. Hever is the village beside the castle where Anne Boleyn grew up. Cowden and Markbeech sit high towards the Sussex border, Four Elms and Marsh Green lie out on the flat clay of the valley, and Crockham Hill climbs the greensand ridge to the north. Farmhouses, oast houses and cottages fill the lanes between them, many of them far older than the roads.

A lot of that countryside has no mains gas. Heat comes from oil, LPG, wood or coal, often through a chimney built for an open fire.

Carbon monoxide and old Wealden chimneys

---

Carbon monoxide is what a flame makes when it burns short of air, and it has no smell, no colour and no taste. Any appliance that burns fuel can put it into a room: a gas or LPG boiler, an oil boiler, a gas fire, a wood burner or a multi-fuel stove. What keeps it out of the house is the flue, and in TN8 the flue is very often a chimney that went up two or three hundred years ago for an open hearth. A chimney of that age can be cracked inside where nobody can see it, partly blocked by a fallen brick, soot or a jackdaw nest, or too wide and cold to draw well for a stove it was never built for. A burner can also drift out of adjustment and start making far more of the gas than it should. The signs are there to be read if you know them. Look for sooting or brown staining around a fire, a stove door or the case of a boiler, and a lazy yellow or orange flame on a gas appliance where the flame ought to be crisp and blue. A pilot light that keeps going out, heavy condensation on the windows of the room the appliance is in, and a smell of fumes when the wind is in a certain direction all point the same way. So do headaches, tiredness or nausea that ease once you are out of the house and come back when you return, especially if more than one person in the household has them. None of those proves a leak on its own, and all of them are worth acting on.

The rules caught up in October 2022. Under Approved Document J in England, fitting or replacing any fixed combustion appliance, gas cookers apart, now requires a carbon monoxide alarm in the same room. The amended alarm regulations for rented homes, in force from the same date, require one in any room used as living accommodation that contains a fixed combustion appliance, again with gas cookers excluded. The guidance on placing it is specific: in the same room as the appliance, between one and three metres from it measured across the floor, and either on the ceiling at least three hundred millimetres from any wall or high on a wall above the doors and windows, no closer than a hundred and fifty millimetres to the ceiling.

An alarm is the backstop. The fix is the appliance and its flue being looked at.