Plumbers & electricians in Westerham and Biggin Hill

Biggin Hill is one of the highest points in Greater London, at over two hundred and ten metres, and it was not planned as a town at all. The land was the Aperfield estate, bought by a London speculator in 1889 and sold off in small plots. Through the early twentieth century those plots filled with weekend bungalows put up by their owners in whatever was cheapest: timber, breeze block, asbestos sheet and corrugated iron. Many were lived in all year from the war onwards, and in the decades after it a great many reached the end of their lives.

Green Belt then fixed the edge of the place, so it grew inward instead. Between the early sixties and the early eighties the housing more than doubled, as closes and small estates replaced the old plots at higher density. Detached houses and bungalows are still the most common homes in Biggin Hill. The former RAF fighter station on the plateau is now London Biggin Hill Airport.

Westerham is far older. It had a market charter in 1227, the Darent runs through it, and it sits in Sevenoaks District with Brasted to the east along the same valley and Toys Hill on the high wooded ground to the south. Tatsfield, up on the downs to the west at around two hundred and thirty metres, is across the county line in Surrey.

Ticking heating pipes in TN16 bungalows

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Copper grows when it warms. The figure is about 0.017 millimetres per metre for every degree, which sounds like nothing until it is multiplied out. A ten metre heating run that goes from a cold house to a flow of seventy degrees has risen by fifty degrees, and it is now around eight millimetres longer than it was an hour ago. If the pipe could slide freely that would make no sound at all. It cannot, because somewhere along the way it is gripped: pressed into a joist notch cut too tight, held in a clip that clamps rather than supports, drilled through a timber with no clearance, or pinned by a floorboard screwed down on top of it. The pipe pushes, the grip holds, the force builds, and then it lets go in a jump. That jump is the tick. It happens again and again along the run until the water reaches temperature, and the whole thing plays in reverse as it cools. A bungalow suffers more than most houses because every room is on one level, so the heating goes out in long straight lengths under a suspended timber floor or across the loft, and a long straight length has nowhere to put its growth except the far end. A two storey house breaks its runs into shorter legs with bends in them, and a bend absorbs movement that a straight pipe has to push somewhere.

The tell is timing: ticking for ten minutes after the heating comes on, again as it goes off, and silence in between.

It very often starts after a boiler change. A new boiler may heat the water faster, run the pump harder or send the flow out hotter than the old one did, and a pipe that crept quietly for twenty winters now moves in bigger, quicker steps. The cure is to find the grip and release it, which means lifting boards or going into the loft at the point the noise comes from. Notches get eased so the pipe sits clear of the timber, a sleeve or a felt lining goes in where it passes through a joist, and clips are set at the right spacing so they carry the pipe without clamping it. Sometimes a small change to the flow temperature or the pump speed takes the edge off as well. Where the pipe runs in a bungalow on a concrete slab, the noisy lengths are usually overhead in the loft rather than underfoot, so where the work happens depends on the property. It is a nuisance, not a danger, but a pipe that rubs against the same edge for years does wear.