Plumbers & electricians in Newington and Teynham

The district is not a town at all. It is the ring of parishes around Sittingbourne, reaching from the Medway estuary at Lower Halstow and Upchurch, across the old Roman road at Newington and Teynham, north to Iwade on the edge of the Swale and south onto the chalk at Hartlip, Bredgar and Stockbury. The building stock follows the land. Saxon and Norman churches with cottages grown up around them, seventeenth and eighteenth century farmhouses, weatherboarded terraces put up for the brickfield and barge trades on the creeks at Conyer and Lower Halstow, and long ranges of farm building that stopped being farm building decades ago and became houses, annexes and rooms to let instead.

Iwade is the exception. In seventeen ninety eight the manor there counted sixteen houses. By the census of two thousand and eleven the village held over three thousand people, nearly all of them in housing built since.

Between those two extremes sits the thing that decides the plumbing here. A lot of ME9 property is not lived in every day of the year. Cottages let by the season, an annexe built on for a relative, the other half of a divided farmhouse, a flat over a village shop that closed, a house standing while probate runs its course. Teynham has grown fruit since Henry the Eighth’s fruiterer planted cherries and apples there, and orchard country has always had buildings that fill and empty with the work.

Stored water in an empty house

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Water in a house is only safe while it keeps moving. A cylinder drawn off and refilled every day, and a cold cistern that empties and fills every day, never get the chance to settle at the temperature bacteria want. Legionella is the one that gets named, and what it wants is the lukewarm middle band, roughly twenty to forty five degrees, along with the scale, rust and sediment on the inside of an older cistern or cylinder to feed on. Hot water kept genuinely hot, around sixty degrees in the cylinder, and cold water kept genuinely cold, under twenty, sit either side of that band, and that is the whole of the basic protection. What breaks it is rarely the main bathroom, because that gets used. It is the outlet nobody has run since the spring: the shower in the annexe, the tap in the utility, the cloakroom in the half of the house that got shut off. It is the shower head left hanging on its hose with water still in it. It is the length of pipe that was capped off when a bathroom moved and left buried in a wall with water standing in it. And it is the loft cistern with a warped lid or no lid, sitting under a roof that gets warm from May onwards, collecting dust, insects and daylight.

There is usually nothing to see. The tell, where there is one, comes on the first draw off after a long gap: water that runs cloudy or rusty, a smell that is earthy rather than chlorinated, and a shower that spits air before it settles down.

Coming back to a property after weeks away is the moment to run everything through rather than assume. Every outlet, hot and cold, one at a time, until the water comes through clear and the hot comes through hot. Showers earn the most care, because a spray makes an aerosol and an aerosol is what gets breathed in, so the honest way to do it is take the head off, run the hose on its own into the tray, then clean and descale the head before it goes back. After that it turns into a property by property question, and there is no single answer to give. A house on a combi stores almost nothing and has a very short list. A cottage with a cylinder and a loft cistern has the lid, whether that cold water is staying cold up there through the summer, the cylinder thermostat, and the capped stubs left over from old work, which are better cut out and taken away than left in the wall full of water.