Hi I’m Robbie Newton, owner and head engineer here at Stonehenge Plumbing and Heating. I hope you had a great Christmas and a happy New Year. December is always a bit of an odd month for us as our industry closes down for 10 days. This leads to a mad rush to get everything done before the festivities begin. We were still open for business throughout the holidays which meant we were very busy as nearly all other plumbing companies and merchants were closed. We even had Worcester Bosch at our offices carrying out engineer training courses..
We’ve noticed in the last 3 – 4 years that our busiest time of the year tends to be in January, February & March. This is when we really see the temperatures drop drastically. Our winter month’s either side of Christmas differ quite a bit. From mid October through to December we often find that boiler & heating repairs relate to issues around their heating systems not being used for 4 – 5 months. When they’re eventually started up and the cob webs are cleared, anything that was on it’s last legs from last winter then tends to fail at that point.
When January comes around, boilers and heating systems start to be used almost constantly though out the day and evening. This puts a lot of stress on the parts so anything that’s had a good lifespan tends to give up the ghost throughout this period. As this is the coldest time of the year we find that our same day / next day response times put us head and shoulders above our colleagues in the industry. We constantly hear from new customers that other companies simply cannot respond for a week or two.
Our office team are specifically setup in a way that allows them to email repair quotes later that same day, if not the following day. Our speciality is being able to do these repairs in a quick space of time and at a rate which is very reasonable. Our rates are the same whether we come out the same day or in a weeks time so you always have an engineer at our earliest availability no matter what. There’s nothing worse than waiting days for an engineer to arrive and then several more days for a repair quote to arrive. Parts that need ordering normally take 1 -2 days to arrive but some of the more obscure boilers may take 7 – 10 days to arrive. A slow response time coupled with a slow turn around time on quotes can really delay your repairs.
Our engineers complete their job reports after each visit and this is done electronically so our office team receive those reports immediately. There’s still a lot of companies working off paper based job reports which then means that the office only sees those reports come the end of the day when the engineer return to the office. You also find that sole traders can only do those quotes come the end of the day as they have no office team as it’s just them.
With that said, if you need us at all then feel free to give us a call on 01722 212050. I’m on the tools most of the time so there’s a good chance your see me at some stage in the near future.
Robbie