Every London borough. Everywhere inside the M25.

The property matters more than the postcode

We cover North, South, East, West and Central London, including Westminster, Camden, Barnet, Enfield, Hackney, Newham, Greenwich, Bromley, Croydon, Sutton, Richmond, Hounslow, Ealing and Hillingdon. These are examples, not a boundary: every borough and every address inside the M25 is within our service area.

A Victorian conversion with a cylinder in a first-floor cupboard, a purpose-built block with a Pulsacoil thermal store, and a new build with an unvented cylinder in the utility room all fail in different ways. Our engineers carry the parts for all three because London housing stock makes you. Knowing which of them we are walking into before we knock is the difference between diagnosing on arrival and working it out on site at your cost.

Victorian and Edwardian conversions

The house was built as one dwelling and now holds several flats. The pipework has been rerouted more than once, usually by different trades who never met, and runs sit under floors that were lifted and screwed back down, behind dry lining, or boxed into a cupboard that someone later tiled over. When a pipe fails in one of these, the water almost never appears where the failure is. It tracks along a joist and comes through a ceiling two rooms away, which is why guessing at the spot and opening it is the most expensive thing anyone can do here.

Hot water in a conversion is usually a vented cylinder in an airing cupboard fed from a loft tank, or a combi fitted when that cylinder came out, with pipework that was never resized to suit it. An engineer checks the cheap and common things first: the immersion element and its thermostat, the motorised valve head, the cylinder stat, and whether the boiler is firing for hot water at all rather than only for heating. On a leak we trace before anything is opened, using acoustic listening, thermal imaging and pressure testing, so that when a floor does come up it comes up in one place.

The part most firms leave out of a conversion job is the reinstatement. Lifting a board is easy. Putting the floor, the wall or the ceiling back so the room looks like a room again is the work, and it is part of ours. We do not hand over a hole and a report.

Purpose-built and mansion blocks

A block behaves like a shared machine. Cold water comes off a communal riser, hot water is often made inside the flat from a landlord supply, and the valve that isolates your flat may sit in a riser cupboard on the landing that you have no key for. The first thing we establish in a block is what can be isolated and what cannot, because that decides whether the repair happens on the visit or whether it needs the building manager there to open a cupboard.

Pulsacoil and similar thermal stores are common in London blocks and they catch people out. The unit is not a boiler and it is not an ordinary cylinder. It holds heated water and passes it through a heat exchanger to make hot water on demand. When it fails you usually get water that runs warm and never hot, or hot water that fades within a minute of the tap opening. The likely causes are the immersion elements, the thermistors, the pump, or a heat exchanger furred up with scale, and each of those is a different fix at a different cost. Replacing the whole unit because the water runs cool is an expensive way to avoid the diagnosis.

New builds, unvented cylinders and liquid screed

Newer flats and houses bring their own list. Hot water normally comes from an unvented cylinder, which is a sealed vessel held at mains pressure with real safety components on it: an expansion vessel, a pressure reducing valve, an expansion relief valve and a temperature and pressure relief valve. Water running from the outside tundish, banging in the pipework, or pressure that keeps falling away are symptoms of those parts rather than of the cylinder itself. An unvented system is not something to open up without the qualification to work on one, and the discharge pipework has to be right as well as the vessel.

Underfloor heating in a new build usually sits in liquid screed, poured over the loops and set solid. You cannot chase into that on a hunch. A leak in a screeded floor is narrowed down with thermal imaging and by pressure testing loops individually at the manifold, so the opening stays small and the making good stays small with it.

What London water does to a hot water system

The supply is hard across almost all of London. That is the single biggest reason cylinders, immersion elements and plate heat exchangers here do not last as long as the manufacturer figures suggest. Scale forms on the hottest surface it can find, which is the element or the exchanger plate, and once it is there that surface is insulated from the water it is meant to be heating.

You feel it first as hot water that takes longer to come through and runs out sooner, then as an element that trips or dies outright. It is worth knowing this before you agree to replace anything, because a scaled exchanger and a failed pump feel much the same at the tap. The check takes minutes and it is the difference between a component and a whole unit.

Flats, freeholders and managing agents

In a leasehold flat a leak is rarely only your problem. Water goes downwards, so the flat below has an interest, and the freeholder has one in anything touching the structure or a communal service. Whether the failed pipe sits inside your demise or belongs to the building often decides who pays for the repair and the damage, and that question gets asked long after the water has been stopped.

We work with managing agents and freeholders regularly. If you need something to send on, we write up what we found, how we found it, where the failure was and what was done about it, in plain terms an agent or an insurer can act on without a translation.

Getting to you

We hold engineers across the city rather than running everything out of one depot, which is what London-wide plumbers and heating engineers means in practice. Attendance depends on where you are, what the traffic is doing and whether the job needs one engineer or a pair with an access kit. Tell us the postcode and what sort of property it is when you get in touch and we will tell you honestly when we can be there, rather than quote you a window we cannot hold.

The rate is fixed before we attend and does not rise for a difficult property, an awkward access or an evening visit. The total depends on how long the job takes; the rate cannot change. What we charge is set out in full on the pricing page.