Landlords and Homeowners: Service your Boiler Annually

Most of us know that it is important to service your boiler to maintain a healthy central heating system. One way of ensuring the user sticks to the schedule of periodic servicing is to use the service interval time controls as a reminder, to ensure they keep to the recommended servicing schedule.

In recent years we have seen a major drive towards upgrading old boilers to new high efficiency boilers to save energy and reduce carbon emissions. Still, there was notably little focus put on the importance of regular boiler maintenance and central heating system servicing.

There are good reasons for ensuring that the boiler and other parts of your central heating system are regularly checked and serviced:

* It ensures that performance is kept stable and reliable even at peak demand levels. This way, the boiler is efficient and economical throughout the year (both at low and high load times).

* It ensure you abide by the law which requires the owner of the property to make sure the boiler and the heating system are in good operating order

Gas Regulation 36 from the Gas safety and Installation 1994 Set has the following requirements:

* The owner of the gas appliance has a duty to ensure that the appliance is kept in a safe condition which prevents the risk of injury to anybody using the property. The owner has to ensure the appliances are checked regularly every twelve months.

* Landlords must ensure that all gas fittings within the property are kept in safe condition which prevents the risk of injury to anybody using the property.

* In addition to the points detailed above, the landlord must ensure that all gas appliances and flues are examined within twelve months of it being installed and at periodic intervals of no more than twelve months between them. This clause is without prejudice to the generality of the above two clauses.

Evidence from the marketplace indicates that it is difficult to enforce these Regulations in the case of private households. It is estimated that there are around 25 million households in the UK and many of them are either unaware of their legal obligation or they are simply delaying the checks due to financial difficulties. There are talks of imposing penalties in cases of accidents that involve damage or injury due to neglect on the side of the home owner.

There are automatic reminding mechanisms that help homeowners or tenants to keep up to the periodic maintenance schedule. Some use a flag up mechanism that raises the flag when it is time to check the system. Other systems take a more drastic route and physically turn the system off if the scheduled service was not done on time, displaying a local engineer's phone number for an emergency service.

Service Interval controls normally provide a period of warning before actually shutting down the system. During the warning period the tenants should arrange for a service call to be made for the boiler to be serviced.

According to the records by boiler servicing companies, calls for boiler servicing rise dramatically the closer it gets to the winter period, as systems are restarted after a long break for the summer. Using an automatic reminder for calling an engineer reduces scheduling crunches and un-serviced systems waiting for an engineer.

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This page has been written with contributions from qualified plumbers from Kent and plumbers from Holland Park. Several of the company's Gas Safe engineers from Essex have worked on similar issues as well as some of our plumbing and heating engineers from Highgate and our Croydon experienced heating engineers.

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