Boiler Repair, Service & Installation in Penge (SE20)

The 2021 Census counted 11,054 households in SE20. 44.1% live in purpose-built flats and 18.7% in converted or shared houses, so more than six in ten are flats, and 72.5% of households heat with mains gas alone. The Valuation Office puts a third of the district’s properties, 33.6%, before 1900, and 14.0% between 1973 and 1982. When a Penge boiler starts making a new noise, the first job is finding whether it is in the boiler or in the pipework.

Name the noise first.

Noises from the boiler casing

A boiler that has always been quiet and starts making a new noise is telling you something, and each sound points somewhere different. A bang or a soft thump as the burner lights means the gas is igniting a fraction late, after some has built up. Switch the boiler off and leave it off until it has been looked at: this is gas work, and it goes to the engineer. A rising rumble, or a whistle like a kettle while the heating runs, comes from water boiling in spots inside the heat exchanger, usually because scale or debris has narrowed the waterways. A hum or a roar that grows over weeks often comes from the fan that pushes the flue gases out, as its bearings wear. Repeated clicking without the burner catching is the ignition trying and failing. All four are inside the casing. Outside it, a buzz or grind from a pump in an airing cupboard, a gurgle in the pipes and a creak from radiators as they warm are ours to look at, and they are easily mistaken for the boiler.

What helps when you ring is a description, or better, a recording. Hold the phone near the boiler when the heating first comes on, then again once it has been running a while. Note whether the noise comes with the hot water, the heating or both, and whether the needle on the pressure gauge moves. A noise that only happens when a tap runs is a different fault from one that only happens with the radiators on.

A bang on lighting is not one to wait on.

Ring 07546 185778 with the make of boiler, when the noise happens and how long it has been doing it, and you will be told straight away whether it is a job for us, for the engineer, or for both.

When the noise turns out to be a worn part on an old boiler, the repair has to be weighed against a new one, and we also arrange boiler installations in SE20 when that is the better answer.