As a landlord we have a legal duty to ensure that all gas appliances, fittings and flues owned by One Vision Housing provided for your use are safe. This includes things like central heating boilers and gas fires.

To do this we must carry out an annual gas safety check or gas service using registered Gas Safe engineers, which will include testing of all required gas appliances, pipe work, flues and smoke alarms in your home.

It’s important to provide access for these essential works in order to keep you, your family and neighbours safe.

 

Information for switching your boiler back on

If you’ve had your boiler switched off over the summer you should have been aiming to fire it up once or twice a month to help prevent a build-up of things like dust, and corrosion. This will also flag up any potential issues before switching back on permanently when the weather gets colder. If you haven’t been doing this and it’s not too cold yet you could still fire it up a couple of times over the coming weeks.

Bleed your radiators if they need it

You’re unlikely to notice if your radiators have stopped working effectively over the summer because they’ve probably not been on. If you find that one or more of your radiators isn’t heating up in certain areas (or not warming up at all) then you might need to bleed your radiators to remove trapped air.

When it comes to radiators, it’s also worth noting that thermostatic radiator valves can get stuck if they’re left closed for too long which means that they won’t work when it comes to turning the heating on again. Try to keep them open as much as you can during the summer months.

Don’t turn the heat up too fast

It can be tempting to crank the heat up as soon as we start feeling the cold, but doing this could mean you set the temperature higher than necessary and end up wasting both energy and money. Instead try to turn your heating up one degree at a time. Generally your thermostat should be set at a temperature you feel comfortable at. For most households this is between 18 and 21 degrees Celsius (and slightly higher for the elderly). It’s also important to remember that turning a thermostat up won’t make your home heat up any faster, it will just reach a higher temperature.

Check for faults

During a long period of inactivity (over the summer) is when problems with your boiler are most likely to happen.

Kettling

If your heating system sounds like a kettle when you turn it on then there could be a build-up of sludge or limescale on your boiler’s heat exchanger, known as kettling. A build-up of this nature can restrict the flow of water within the heat exchanger, causing it to overheat, steam and boil.

Pilot light going out

You should start by checking that there are no issues with your gas supply before trying to reignite the pilot light. This could be caused by a broken thermocouple that’s stopping the gas supply or maybe even a draught blowing the pilot light