A house is not a small commercial building. You are living in it while the work happens, and you are paying for it yourself.
That changes three things and they run through everything below. The heating and the hot water cannot simply be off for a week, so the job gets sequenced around that rather than around us. The price has to be right the first time, because there is no facilities budget sitting behind it. And the mess is in your kitchen, not in a plant room, so it gets cleared at the end of each day instead of at the end of the job.
The trade is the same one we take into a commercial building. What is different is how it is run around the people in the house.
Most of what people complain about after a heating job is not the heating. It is four different trades who each blame the one before, a house full of dust for a fortnight, and nobody who can tell you when it will be finished.
So we do the whole job. Strip out, first fix, making good, tiling, second fix and the clean up, with one person to ring about any of it. Where something genuinely falls outside our trade, you get told before you commit rather than halfway through.
A price for the work in front of us and a separate line for anything we can see coming, so you can decide what to do now and what to leave. Where a survey is needed first, you are told that and what it costs before agreeing to anything.
The days we are there, and what will be isolated, agreed in advance. Water and heating go back on overnight wherever the job allows it, and the room is usable again at the end of the day rather than at the end of the week.
Set, balanced and run up under load, and then explained standing in front of it rather than left on the factory default. Readings, settings and the parts that went in are written down, so next year there is something to compare against.
Most of the houses we work in are off the gas main, and a fair number of them are older than the heating trade.
That means oil, and it means pipework that has been added to by five different people over forty years. Solid floors, single skin walls, a boiler in an outbuilding and a cylinder fitted around a staircase. None of it is a problem and none of it is standard either, which is why what the house measures matters more than what the catalogue says.
It also means hard water. Suffolk water is aggressive enough to take years off a heat exchanger and to narrow the pipework quietly behind the wall, which is the only reason water softeners appear on this site at all.
"Our new bathroom fits our needs perfectly and they left the place so clean and tidy."
Zoe T"Our new water softener has been a game changer. Sourced and installed so quickly."
Anthony M"They updated our antiquated heating system. It has made such a difference this winter."
Hannah A