Last November, on the first properly cold Monday, our office phone rang 52 times before lunch and 31 of those calls were some version of "we've got no heating". On an ordinary Monday it's maybe a dozen calls altogether, and most of them are people asking when their boiler service is. I'm in the office on that trading estate in Kirkstall on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I hear all of it. The engineers go out in their vans, six of them, and I'm the person who has to tell somebody that the next free appointment is next Tuesday.
All of which makes it a bit embarrassing that I almost let our own service slide this year.
Why I nearly skipped it
It was money, plainly. The boiler is ten years old this year, it was working perfectly, and the heating hasn't even been on yet, so there was nothing to prove it needed attention. The service is £60 at the staff rate (it's £85 for everybody else), which I'm lucky to get, and it came hard on the heels of the uniform at £187.40, a Gousto experiment and the insurance renewal. Our boiler and central heating cover, at £14 a month, doesn't include the annual service. I checked, in case I'd misremembered, and I hadn't. So £60 had to come from somewhere, and for about three weeks I told myself it was a job for November.
Then I did what I do every autumn: I read through the job sheets for the previous winter. They are not exciting, but they have a pattern. Low pressure. A condensate pipe blocked with limescale. A fan starting to whine. A seal weeping onto a bracket. I'm not an engineer and I don't diagnose anything, I type up what the engineers write. But I know how many of those sheets are for boilers that didn't have a service in the previous twelve months, and the proportion is high enough that I put us in the diary myself on Tuesday 30 September and took the Saturday slot.
What the engineer actually did
Lee came on Saturday 4 October at nine, with the firm's van parked half on the pavement outside, which Jean next door took a keen interest in. Rob was out on his round, so I had the kids and a pot of tea. Alfie wanted to know if Lee was a plumber or a mechanic, and Lee said, "A bit of both, mate."
It took about 50 minutes. Here is what I saw him do, in the order he did it:
- Took the front off the boiler and checked the flame and the burner
- Put a probe into the flue to test the gases it was giving off
- Cleaned the heat exchanger and checked the condensate trap
- Tested the pressure in the system and topped it up
- Checked the carbon monoxide alarm in the kitchen
- Filled in a service sheet and had me sign it
The pressure was 0.8 bar, which is low for a sealed system, and he put it back to about 1.3. He said that was common after a summer of nothing running. He also bled the radiator in Alfie's room, which I could have done myself with the £2 key in the kitchen drawer, and the top third of it, cold since last winter, finally warmed up on the test. Alfie's room is the box room at the front, and I'd put the chill down to the box room. I'd been wrong.
Nothing needed replacing. He told me the part he sees fail most on a ten-year-old combi is the diverter valve, and said ours was fine, but to keep an ear out for noises. I wrote "keep an ear out" on the whiteboard, under the shopping list.
What November is like
The thing I can't unsee is how fast the calls change. From the first frost, my work stops being "can I book a service" and becomes "it's gone cold". By the second week of November the diary for no-heat calls is pretty much full for a week ahead, and in January it can run nine days. That's not a complaint about us, it's six engineers and a lot of boilers. People who've had a service are not immune, and I don't want to suggest they are. They just tend to ring about different things.
The cover has its own small print, and I read ours again: it says the boiler should be serviced every year and asks to see the paperwork if I claim. Yours will say what yours says, so it's one to read properly.
I've put the service sheet in the folder in the bottom drawer, next to the new home insurance schedule. Next year I'll book it in September, when the diary still has gaps and nobody is cold.
