Plumbers & electricians in Hildenborough and Hadlow

The district wraps round Tonbridge on three sides and crosses three councils while doing it. Hildenborough, Hadlow, Shipbourne and Golden Green sit in Tonbridge and Malling. Penshurst, Leigh and Chiddingstone Causeway are in Sevenoaks District. Tudeley, with its small church and the Chagall windows people travel to see, belongs to Tunbridge Wells borough. Hildenborough is the largest of them, strung along the old road out towards Sevenoaks with the railway beside it. Hadlow is known for its tower, the tall Gothic folly left from Hadlow Castle, and for the land-based college on its edge. Penshurst gathers around the walls of Penshurst Place.

Between them is Medway valley farmland: fields, orchards, old hop gardens, oast houses and a great many barns, stables and outbuildings, a good share of them since turned into homes or workshops. The houses are mostly older cottages and farmhouses, with twentieth century semis and small estates added to each village over the decades.

That spread of ages and uses is what matters here. A lot of it was plumbed, heated or re-roofed in the years when asbestos was an ordinary building material.

Asbestos around old boilers and tanks

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Asbestos went into British buildings for most of the twentieth century and was not banned outright until nineteen ninety nine, so any house or farm building built or refitted before then can have it. The trouble for a plumber is that it turns up in the very places plumbing lives. A grey cement cold water cistern in the loft may be asbestos cement. So may the flue pipe rising from an old boiler or warm-air unit. The board lining a boiler cupboard or an airing cupboard, or fixed behind an old boiler to protect the wall, may be asbestos insulating board. Old pipe lagging in a loft or under a floor can contain it, and so can a textured ceiling coating that a new pipe run has to pass through. Outside, the corrugated sheet roofs and panels on barns, stables and sheds in this farmland are very often asbestos cement. None of these is dangerous sitting quietly. The fibres are locked into the material, and the hazard only begins when the material is drilled, cut, sanded or broken, which is exactly what installing pipework involves. You cannot tell by looking, either. Plenty of old grey board is plain fibreboard, and plenty of harmless-looking cement is not. The only answer that counts is a sample tested in a laboratory, or a survey by someone qualified to do one.

So the order is simple: stop, identify, then decide.

If a suspect material sits where the work has to go, the job pauses until it has been sampled. If the test comes back clear, the work carries on as planned. If it comes back positive, there are usually two routes. Often the pipe or flue can be run a different way so the material is never disturbed. Where it has to come out, the type decides who does it: HSE treats asbestos insulating board, lagging and sprayed coatings as work for a licensed contractor, while asbestos cement sheet and cisterns can usually be removed without a licence by someone trained for it, following HSE guidance. We do not remove asbestos. Our part is recognising what might be there and not putting a drill through it, and which route applies depends entirely on the property.