Hello everyone, I hope you and your boiler are well and you’ve enjoyed the mild weather that we’ve been experiencing this autumn!
We’ve now entered the busiest time of the year for us. Our engineers have been fully booked up for the past couple of weeks. As it’s been milder, we’ve noticed that many heating systems have started to fire up after a long period of inactivity. I would estimate that most heating systems haven’t been in use since the beginning of May.
Our phones have been very busy with boiler related issues and we haven’t had a cold spell yet. There’s word from the weather forecasters that the mercury is due to drop substantially during the next couple of weeks.
If you haven’t fired up your heating system yet then I would highly recommend that you do so. If you leave it to the last minute and then have a problem you are really going to struggle to get a heating engineer from most places quickly.
It’s very tricky for companies to have excess work force for colder spells as those engineers require work all year round. We have had an incredibly warm 6 months so there will be many companies that would have struggled to keep all their engineers employed. Sub contractors are always very busy from October to April so it’s not like they can call upon them for extra work force. Sub contractors want to work for companies during the May – September period because they are quiet but companies are also quieter during those month’s.
Our business model is setup to be reactive so we can often attend the same day or next but even we struggle from time to time during the very busy periods. A good place to start is by having your boiler serviced every 12 month’s and particularly during the summer period as availability is much higher and you can live with waiting for parts to arrive. If you haven’t serviced your boiler in the past 12 months then I would say this is really essential because many minor faults can be picked up before they get more serious.
If a part needs to be ordered and it’s for a well known boiler manufacturer such as Worcester, Glow Worm or Grant then your likely to be looking at next day delivery for the more common parts, less common parts could be potentially 3 – 4 working days. If you have a boiler that is 15 years old or dare I say a more obscure cheaper boiler manufacturer then it’s very common for 7 – 10 working days for delivery.
If your requiring a heating engineer then you’ve realistically left it a little to late to get a same day or next response from many places however you should act right now to avoid a much longer delay when it does really get cold.
As always, stay safe and I’ll have another blog posted for next month.
Robbie