Plumbers & electricians in New Cross

The New Cross Road runs straight through the middle, with Goldsmiths on one side and two stations, New Cross and New Cross Gate, only a few hundred metres apart. Behind the shopfronts are terraces and semi detached villas, and south of the main road the ground climbs into Telegraph Hill, a planned late Victorian estate laid out on Haberdashers' Company land from around 1870 and made a conservation area in 1990. Post war blocks and later infill sit in among all of it, so the stock is mixed even along one street.

What ties it together is occupancy rather than age. A house designed for one household with a scullery and a single bathroom is now, very often, five or six bedrooms with two or three shower rooms fitted into whatever space was going, and the plumbing was extended room by room instead of designed in one go.

Plenty of the work is ordinary. An emergency plumber in New Cross spends a fair share of the week on an overflowing cistern, or a blocked drain in New Cross where a back addition gully has silted up, or working alongside an electrician in New Cross on a circuit run into a converted loft years ago. But the question that comes up again and again in these houses is hot water, and specifically how fast it comes back.

Why the third shower is cold in a shared New Cross house

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Most of these houses have been put onto a combi at some point, because it frees up the airing cupboard and the loft, and for two or three people it is the right call. A combi heats water as it passes through, so it never runs out, but it can only heat as fast as its burner allows. That output is fixed by the appliance, not by the pipework, and one decent shower wants a good chunk of it. Open a second and the boiler divides what it has between them, so both go weak and lukewarm at the same moment. The person already washing notices before the person who just turned theirs on.

A stored system behaves in the opposite way. A cylinder holds hot water already made, so three showers at once is no trouble, because everyone is drawing from a store rather than queuing at a burner. The catch arrives afterwards. Once the cylinder is emptied it has to reheat, and that takes real time, commonly around half an hour on a boiler heated coil and considerably longer on an immersion heater alone. So the complaint in a stored house is never a weak shower. It is a good shower, then another, then nothing for a while, and the household quietly starts rationing who goes when.

Choosing between them is a counting exercise, not a matter of taste. Count the people, count the bathrooms, and work out whether the house needs several outlets running at once or a fast turnaround between them. One bathroom and three people is well served by a combi. Six people with three shower rooms all leaving at similar times is usually not, and the honest answer there is stored hot water sized to the actual demand, with a recovery time the household can live with, rather than the smallest cylinder that fits the cupboard. The common mistake is to treat a disappointing combi as a faulty one, fit a bigger combi, and buy slightly more flow at real expense while the underlying limit stays where it was. Either route has to be checked against the incoming main as well, because neither a large cylinder nor a high output combi is worth much if the supply into the house cannot feed it.