Boiler Servicing in London and Kent

How often should a boiler be serviced?

Once a year. Boiler makers' instructions ask for a yearly service, and it is when the engineer measures how cleanly the boiler burns, cleans the condensate trap and checks the seals and safety devices. London City Plumbers books it with the gas engineers we work with. To book, ring or WhatsApp 07546 185778 with your postcode.

What happens at a boiler service

A service starts outside the boiler and works in. The engineer asks how the boiler has been behaving and looks at any fault history it has stored, then checks the flue from end to end where it can be seen, including the terminal outside, for damage, gaps or anything built up against it. With the casing off, the burner, the heat exchanger and the electrodes that light the gas and sense the flame are inspected and cleaned, and the seals round the combustion chamber are looked at, because a tired seal lets flue gas go where it should not. On a condensing boiler, the condensate trap inside is emptied and cleaned. The gas pressure is checked, and the burning itself is measured with an electronic flue gas analyser, which reads the carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in the flue and shows whether the boiler is burning cleanly against the maker’s figures. The safety devices are tested, the controls are run through, and the system pressure is noted. If the boiler has a magnetic filter on its pipework, that is usually emptied at the same visit. Everything found, and every reading, goes on the service record in the boiler’s commissioning booklet. Before leaving, the engineer tells you what was found and when the next service is due.

If a part is worn, you are told what it is and what replacing it involves before anything else is done.

Why once a year

Boiler makers' instructions ask for a yearly service, and the commissioning booklet that comes with a boiler has a page for each one. The reasons are practical. Combustion drifts as parts wear and debris builds up, and a boiler can burn badly while still keeping the house warm, which is why the reading matters more than how the heating feels. Seals harden, traps fill, and electrodes wear, and each of those is cheaper to find in September than to suffer in January.

Landlords have a separate duty in law: every gas appliance and flue in a rented home has to be checked for safety at intervals of not more than 12 months, with a copy of the record given to each tenant within 28 days of the check. That check and a service are different jobs, and they are often booked on the same visit.

A carbon monoxide alarm is still worth having.

What we arrange, and what we do

The service itself, and anything else inside the casing, is done by the gas engineers we work with. We book it, and because we are plumbers and electricians we can deal with the rest of the system on the same visit: radiators that need bleeding or balancing, a weeping valve, a pressure that keeps dropping, a condensate pipe that sags, or a wireless thermostat that has lost its receiver.

One call covers the lot.