Plumbers & electricians in Penge

The district sits in the dip below Crystal Palace, with Anerley Road and the High Street running through it and the park on the ridge above. Penge and Anerley grew together once the railways came through, and what got built was street after street of terraces and modest semis for people commuting into London. The Alexandra Cottages, put up in pairs with a garden front and back in the late eighteen sixties, are the tidiest example, but the pattern repeats across most of SE20.

None of those houses were built with central heating. Every room that mattered had a fireplace, every fireplace had a flue, and the chimney breasts are structural rather than decorative. So when gas central heating arrived in the sixties and seventies, the cheapest way to get a boiler into a solid old terrace was to use a hole that already existed.

Most of the work here is second or third generation as a result, from pipework threaded through houses that never planned for it to the tired underground runs behind a blocked drain in Penge.

The back boiler still sitting in the chimney breast

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A back boiler is a gas heat exchanger built into the opening of a chimney breast, hidden behind what looks like an ordinary gas fire. The Baxi Bermuda was the common one, and huge numbers went into houses like these between the mid sixties and the late eighties. You usually recognise one by absence: nothing on the kitchen wall, nothing in the airing cupboard, nothing in the loft, and yet there is a cylinder upstairs, a tank above it, a programmer screwed to a wall somewhere awkward, and a gas fire downstairs that heats the whole house. The brick chimney is doing the job of the flue.

They are at the end of their lives now, on age alone. The youngest are close to forty and the oldest are past sixty, they have not been made for years, and new ones stopped going in once the efficiency rules changed. That is what makes boiler repair in Penge on one of these different from a repair on a modern combi. The fault is usually ordinary, a gas valve or a thermocouple, but the part is not in the van and might not be in the country. The symptoms are familiar: the fire lights while the radiators stay cool, or hot water only appears an hour after the fire goes on.

Replacing one is a bigger job than swapping a boiler on a wall, and it helps to know that before anyone quotes. The new appliance does not normally go where the old one was, because a brick chimney is not a flue for a condensing boiler. It goes on an outside wall, with a sealed flue and a condensate drain run to somewhere it can discharge. The old opening gets cleared and made good, and the chimney capped and vented so an unused flue does not sit damp. The gain is space, because the cylinder and the loft tank become redundant, which hands back an airing cupboard and a good part of the loft.