Plumbing & Heating Guides

Not every leak announces itself with a puddle. Some run quietly behind a wall or under the floor for weeks, and by the time you spot the damage the repair is far bigger than it needed to be. Here’s how to catch one early.

That constant trickle or the cistern refilling every few minutes isn’t just annoying — on a water meter it’s money down the pan, literally. The cause is nearly always one of two valves inside the cistern.

Of all the plumbing know-how worth having, this is the one that saves the most damage: being able to stop the water fast. When a pipe bursts, the minutes spent hunting for the stopcock are the minutes your floors and ceilings are getting soaked.

A dripping tap is one of those small annoyances that’s easy to ignore — until you’re lying awake listening to it. It’s rarely serious, but it does waste water and money, and the fix depends on the type of tap you have.

Weak flow from a single tap usually means a problem at that tap. But when the pressure is low everywhere — kitchen, bathroom, upstairs and down — the cause sits further back, and it’s worth knowing where to look before you call anyone out.

Boilers tend to fail when they’re worked hardest — the first proper cold snap. The good news is that most winter breakdowns are avoidable with a few simple habits through the year.

If a radiator is warm at the bottom but cold at the top, trapped air is the usual cause — and bleeding it is one of the few heating jobs you can safely do yourself. Here’s how.

An annual service can feel like a ‘maybe next year’ job when the boiler seems fine. But the case for booking one every year is stronger than most people realise — and it’s about far more than ticking a box.

‘Boiler service’ can mean very different things depending on who does it. Here’s what a thorough one actually involves, so you know whether you’re getting your money’s worth.

When a boiler breaks down, the first question is usually the hardest: is it worth fixing, or am I throwing good money after bad? There’s no single answer — but a few honest questions get you most of the way there. And for the record, we fix far more boilers than we replace.