Boiler Servicing and Repair in Watford

Call 07970 632 064 and tell us what the boiler is doing.

Boiler repairs in Watford

Most of what we get called to is one of four things. The boiler has locked out and is showing a fault code. It has lost pressure again a week after being topped up. It is heating the radiators but not the hot water, or the other way round. Or it is making a noise, usually a kettling sound that has been getting worse for a month.

None of those four automatically means a new boiler, and it is worth knowing that before somebody tells you otherwise. A pressure drop that keeps coming back is usually a leaking valve or an expansion vessel that has lost its charge. Kettling is normally scale or sludge rather than a dying appliance. Both are repairs.

Fault finding is the part of this job that saves people real money, and it is what Andrew has spent forty years doing. If a boiler has been condemned or written off by somebody else, get a second opinion before you replace it, because being wrong about that costs thousands rather than hundreds.

We give you the price before we start. If a repair is not worth doing, we will say so rather than take the money and leave you buying a boiler six months later anyway.

What an annual service actually involves

A service means opening the boiler up, not glancing at it. We check combustion with a flue gas analyser and record the readings, inspect the heat exchanger, burner and seals, test the safety devices, check the flue and its terminal along its whole visible run, check the gas pressure and the system pressure, and clean what needs cleaning.

You get told what we found, including anything that is fine now but will not be in two years. If your boiler is still inside its manufacturer's warranty, the service is also what keeps that warranty valid. Missing one is a common and expensive way to lose cover you have already paid for.

Why servicing earns its money faster in Watford

Watford has very hard water, and that is not a figure of speech.

Affinity Water supplies the town through two zones. The Watford North zone runs at 323 mg/l of calcium carbonate and the Watford South zone, which covers our own WD18 base, runs at 353 mg/l. Affinity's own published scale calls anything above 300 mg/l very hard, so the entire town sits in the supplier's top band, and it does not vary much by season because it comes from the rock the water passes through rather than the weather.

For a combi that matters more than it does for a system with a cylinder. The combi heats mains water on demand, which means the hot side of its heat exchanger is meeting fresh hard water every time somebody runs a tap. Scale builds on that surface, and a partly furred exchanger loses efficiency and starts kettling for a long time before it gives up entirely. Catching it at a service is the difference between a clean and a part, or between a part and a boiler.

If you are on a combi in Watford, scale protection is worth a conversation. We will tell you honestly whether your setup needs it, and we fit it as standard on a new installation.

Watford's housing, and what it changes about the work

Two things about Watford's building stock turn up in this work constantly, and neither is true of most of the towns around it.

More than a third of Watford lives in a flat

36.5% of Watford households are in a flat, against 21.7% across England and Wales. 28.8% are in purpose-built blocks specifically. That is a significantly more flatted town than its neighbours, and it changes the job in practical ways: where the flue can run and terminate, whether the boiler position can move at all, what the freeholder or managing agent has to approve, and how we get equipment in. These are things to settle before the work rather than discover on the day, which is why we ask about them when you call rather than when we arrive.

Close to half of it was built before 1940

Watford has 43,260 dwellings and roughly half of them predate 1940, including 6,290 built in the 1930s alone. Cassiobury is largely 1930s. That stock is mostly sound and often has decades left in it, but it brings the familiar problems: solid walls that are awkward to core, no convenient external wall near where the boiler already sits, and chimney breasts that people assume will take a flue and generally will not.

Watford also has ten conservation areas: Civic Core, Estcourt, Grove Mill Lane, High Street and King Street, Macdonell Gardens, Nascot, Oxhey, St Mary's, The Square and Watford Heath. The council's own rule is that installing, altering or replacing a flue on a house needs planning permission where it fronts a highway and is on the principal or side elevation. A rear flue is usually outside that. On top of the conservation areas the council lists more than 130 Article 4 records, and some of those apply to a single named address, so being outside a conservation area is not by itself an answer. If you are in one of the ten, or anywhere near the town centre, we check before anything gets ordered.

Landlords in Watford

Roughly one Watford home in four is rented from a private landlord, which is a higher share than most of Hertfordshire. If you let a property here with a gas appliance in it, you need a Gas Safety Record every twelve months, a copy to the tenant within 28 days, and a copy to any new tenant at the start of the tenancy.

We can do the safety check and the annual service on the same visit, which for most landlords is the sensible way round rather than paying twice for someone to look at the same boiler.

Who comes out

Andrew Millward, founder, forty years in the trade, Viessmann accredited and a Heat Geek Elitist. Andrew does most of the fault finding and the system design.

Elis Harizi, director, plumbing since 2007 and a Heat Geek member. Elis trained in Greece, took his gas qualifications here, and does most of our installation and underfloor work.

We do not use subcontractors. The person who quotes the job is the person who turns up to do it, and we are Gas Safe registered under 586325 if you want to check us before we arrive.

How we work

• No call-out fee and no charge for quoting
• A fixed price agreed before the work starts
• One year guarantee on our workmanship
• Monday to Friday 8am to 9pm, Saturday and Sunday 9am to 5pm

Related work and nearby towns

If your boiler is past repairing, replacement and new installations are covered on our boiler installation in Watford page. Radiators that are cold at the bottom, systems that take an hour to warm up, power flushing and controls all sit under central heating, and we take ordinary plumbing work in Watford too, from leaks and taps through to bathrooms.

Beyond the town we also cover Bushey, Croxley Green and Oxhey.

To book a service, get a fault looked at, or get a second opinion on a boiler somebody else has written off, call Andrew or Elis on 07970 632 064.