Plumber and heating engineer in Chelmsford

Beaulieu, Channels and the new build north of the city

Chelmsford has put up more new housing in the last ten years than anywhere else we cover, and the bulk of it sits north and east of the city at Beaulieu Park, Channels and Springfield. A great deal of it is flats and apartments, and a great deal of that is on communal or district heating, which means there is no appliance in the home at all.

What is in the cupboard instead is a heat interface unit. It takes hot water from the block’s plant room through a pair of pipes and uses it to run the radiators and the taps through plate heat exchangers. It does not burn anything and it has no flue, which is why a gas engineer is not who you want when it stops working.

New build has its own pattern of faults, and it is not the same as an old block’s. The units are young, so what goes wrong is usually commissioning rather than wear: a flow temperature set for the wrong season, a strainer full of installation debris off a system that was flushed in a hurry, an actuator that has never been driven through its range. All three read to a resident as a unit that is not man enough for the flat, and none of them is.

The city centre blocks, and who actually owns the fault

Closer in, around the station, Bond Street and the Meadows, the blocks are a mix of purpose-built apartments and converted offices. The converted ones are the interesting ones: a building designed as offices and turned into flats has pipework that was laid out for a different purpose, and the riser serving your cupboard may run somewhere nobody has a drawing for.

The question that decides the visit is whether the fault is in your flat or in the supply into it. If your neighbours have hot water and you do not, the building is fine and the fault is yours: the unit, the strainer, the valves or the controls. If nobody on the riser has any, it is the landlord’s or the managing agent’s plant and we will tell you that rather than charge you to find it out twice.

Blocks, agents and doing a run of flats in one visit

A city with this much new apartment stock has a lot of managing agents in it, and a block of heat interface units is a different job from a single flat. The units are the same make, they were all commissioned in the same week by the same contractor, and they tend to go the same way at the same time, which is useful to know before anybody books a day.

Done as a run off one riser it is quicker per flat and it is priced that way: £130 for a single property, £120 each for up to five, £100 each for five to ten in the same visit. What slows it down is access rather than the work, so a schedule that residents have actually been told about is worth more than an extra pair of hands.

What comes back at the end is what was found in each flat, in plain words, with anything worth watching flagged before it turns into a call-out. If a unit needs a part we say so and price it separately rather than doing it on the day.

Moulsham, Springfield and the houses

Away from the flats, Chelmsford is a city of ordinary houses: Victorian and Edwardian terraces through Moulsham and New London Road, between-the-wars semis out through Springfield and Chelmer Village, and estates of the seventies and eighties filling the gaps between them.

The complaint from those is almost never no heating. It is one room that will not warm up, hot water that has gone lukewarm, or a leak somebody can hear and cannot find. Pipework added to one radiator at a time over forty years explains most of the first; a cylinder or a blocked exchanger explains most of the second; and the third is a job of tracing rather than guessing, which is why we would rather come and look at it than price it over the phone.

We also cover Writtle, Great Baddow, Margaretting and Ingatestone from here.