Getting Your Heating Ready for Winter.

The first cold night of the year is our busiest shift, and most of those calls are systems that have sat idle since March. Twenty minutes in October moves you out of that queue.

Run it before you need it

Turn the heating on for half an hour on a mild day in October. Anything that failed quietly over summer fails now, while you can still get an appointment inside a week and the house is not freezing.

Check the pressure gauge

Cold system, needle between 1 and 1.5 bar. Lower and the boiler will lock out on the first cold morning. If you top it up and it drops again within a fortnight, you have a leak somewhere, and finding it is a job rather than a guess.

Bleed the radiators that stay cold at the top

Cold top, warm bottom means trapped air. Bleed key, quarter turn, catch the drip, close it when water comes. Re-check the pressure afterwards, because bleeding drops it.

If a radiator is cold at the bottom instead, that is sludge, and bleeding will not touch it.

Find the stopcock and the thermostat batteries

Two minutes, both of them. The stopcock matters at 2am in January, not on a Tuesday afternoon, and by then nobody wants to be opening cupboards with a torch.

Wireless thermostats eat batteries and then quietly stop calling for heat. People replace boilers over this.

Clear the outdoor unit and the flue

Leaves out of the heat pump base, shrubs cut back, nothing stacked against it. Check the boiler flue outside is clear of nests and growth.

Then book the service

If it has been more than a year, book it now rather than in December. Plan customers get first call on the diary, and in the last week of November that is the difference between tomorrow and a fortnight.