Emergency Boiler Repair in Greenhithe (DA9)

At the 2021 Census, 37% of households in DA9, Greenhithe and Stone together, lived in a purpose-built block of flats. The Valuation Office’s build-period count fills in the rest: 1,590 homes from 2000 to 2008 and another 1,620 from 2009 onwards. Those are the years, and the kind of home, that the industry’s technical bulletin on flues in voids was mainly written about.

For a breakdown, that changes the order of things. You might ring about no hot water, a code or a boiler that will not fire, and the fault may be an ordinary one. But before an engineer can leave the boiler running, they have to be able to inspect its flue, and in a flat where the flue disappears into a ceiling that may not be possible on the day. DA9 also has a higher share of households renting privately than any other DA district, and that decides who arranges what happens next.

So the first question may be about your ceiling.

Flues hidden in ceiling voids

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In a lot of flats the boiler sits on an inside wall, in a kitchen or utility cupboard, with no outside wall behind it to take a flue. The flue still has to reach fresh air, so it leaves the top of the boiler, turns, and runs sideways through the space above a ceiling or along a boxed-in run until it meets an outside wall, sometimes a room or more away. Once the decorators have been, nobody sees it again. From the kitchen, the only sign may be a pipe vanishing into the ceiling above the boiler cupboard. A long flue run has joints, and a joint nobody can see is a joint nobody can check, which is the whole problem. The bulletin set 31 December 2012 as the date by which inspection hatches had to be fitted. From 1 January 2013, an engineer who cannot inspect a flue will advise that the installation is at risk and, with permission, turn off the gas. The fault you rang about does not change that. Worcester’s flue instructions give a sense of what the hatches have to achieve: none smaller than 300mm square, and no joint in the flue more than 1.5m from the edge of one. So a long run needs more than one hatch, placed where the joints are rather than where it is easiest to cut. Whether your flat already has them depends on what was done about that 2012 deadline, and the only way to know is to look.

Do not open a void or cut a hatch yourself.

What you can do from the cupboard is look. If the pipe leaving the top of the boiler goes straight back through the wall behind it, the flue is probably in plain sight and none of this applies to you. If it goes up into the ceiling or into a boxed run, follow the line it takes towards an outside wall and look along that line for square panels in the ceilings, in the hall, a bathroom or a bedroom. Clear whatever is standing under them. Do not unscrew them or push them up. When you ring, tell us how many you found, or that you found none, because none means the boiler may have to stay off until the flue can be inspected, whatever the fault you rang about.

None of that needs a ladder or a screwdriver.

If you own the flat, the hatches are normally yours to arrange, but read the lease first, because in some blocks the space above the ceiling belongs to the freeholder. Either way they should be positioned from the flue route and its joints, not guessed from below.

If cutting hatches into two or three ceilings makes you wonder about a new boiler on an outside wall instead, we also arrange boiler installations, and that page covers moving a boiler as well as replacing one.