Oil is still what most of rural Suffolk runs on, and it is still worth running well.
OFTEC registered servicing, installation, commissioning and breakdown response. A service is a strip and clean with a combustion test at the end, not a look and a sticker. If a boiler is at the end of its life we will tell you what it would cost to replace it and what it would cost to keep it going, and let you decide.
A leaking joint and a full first fix are the same trade done at different sizes.
Taps, showers, cylinders, cold feeds, waste, outside taps, stopcocks that have not turned since the house was built. Extensions and renovations first fixed and second fixed to suit the build programme rather than holding it up.
One trade in and out, rather than four you have to chase.
Strip out, first fix, walls and floors made good, tiling, second fix, silicone and the clean up. We will work to your design and suppliers, or spec it with you if you would rather not. It is the work our customers write to us about most, which is why it is on this site at all.
Getting the far end of the house warm is a design job, not a bigger boiler.
Radiators and towel rails sized to the room and to the flow temperature, pipework renewed where it is undersized, then the whole system balanced so every emitter does its share. Designer radiators and heated towel rails specified and fitted where you want them rather than where the old one was.
Slow to warm up, cold at the bottom, cold spots along the run. That is sludge, not a boiler that needs replacing.
Rust, magnetite and boiler debris build up inside the pipework of every wet heating system. Once there is enough of it, circulation drops, the far end of the house never gets warm and the boiler burns more fuel to deliver less heat into the rooms.
A powerflush takes it out. High flow at low pressure, run circuit by circuit with a clearing chemical, so the debris lifts without putting the pipework under a pressure it was never built for. Magnetic filtration sits on the return for the whole job and catches the magnetite as it comes. Inhibitor to the correct dose at the end, and a note of what went in.
The rig stands where it can reach the system rather than where it is convenient, and the boards and dust sheets go down before anything is connected. Each circuit is flushed in turn, and the magnetic filter is stripped and wiped between them.
That last part is the one that matters. What comes off the magnet on the third pass tells you whether the job is finished, and it is the only honest way to know.
The flush is surveyed with a thermal camera as it runs, at the same distance and the same emissivity setting each time, so what changed is a reading rather than an opinion. The three frames below are from one house on one morning, timestamped on the camera.
It is also how we know when to stop. A panel that is still cold at the bottom has not finished, whatever the water coming back looks like.
Copies of the survey frames go out with the job sheet, along with the inhibitor dose and the product that went in, so the next engineer to open the system has something to work from.
The top rail is hot and most of the surface is not. Those dark bands are where the sludge has settled and the water has stopped moving.
Water is arriving at 67 degrees and going straight along the top rail and out again. Everything below the first few inches of panel is still blocked.
Four minutes later the panel is carrying heat across its whole face. The centre reading has gone from 29.4 to 53.6 with the boiler doing no more work than it was.
Magnetite. Iron oxide that has come off the inside of the radiators and the pipework, and that was going round through the pump and the heat exchanger until this morning. Every wet system makes it. The question is only whether anything is taking it out.
The magnetic filter runs on the return for the whole flush, so what lifts out of one circuit is taken out of the system rather than driven into the next one. It gets stripped and wiped between circuits, not at the end.
Suffolk water is hard enough to be a maintenance problem in its own right.
Scale takes the efficiency out of a heat exchanger, shortens the life of every appliance in the house, and quietly narrows the pipework behind the wall. A softener plumbed in properly, with the hard tap kept for drinking, pays for itself over the life of a boiler.
A good control strategy is the cheapest efficiency upgrade there is.
Programmable and smart thermostats, zone valves, weather compensation and cylinder controls, set up around how the building is actually used. Most systems we are called to are running on the settings they left the factory with.
"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