Before calling a heating engineer, you can do a few quick checks to see if the problem is something you can rectify yourself. After all, your time is valuable, and there are certainly better things you could be doing with it than waiting around for a gas engineer who isn’t needed.
- Do you have gas? No, it’s not a trick question. We get quite a few call-outs to people who have forgotten to top up the meter or hung something on the handle, and it has fallen to the closed position. Try the cooker or a gas fire to see if they’re working, if not, check your meter, then call your gas supplier.
- Is the boiler pressure OK? Another regular call-out that doesn’t require a gas engineer to attend is boilers with low pressure. There should be a gauge on the front of the boiler or near your hot water cylinder if you have one. The needle on the gauge should be between 10 - 12 O’clock. If it’s dropped to 9 O’clock, you’ll need to top the pressure up. There are too many ways to explain here, but the booklet left when the boiler was installed will have all the information.
- Is there air in the system? It doesn’t take much air in the system to cause havoc with the boiler. It could be noisy, intermittently overheating, or just random radiators not heating. Check a few, particularly at the top of the house, if they’re cold at the top but hot at the bottom, try bleeding them and see if the boiler kicks in.
- Is there power to the boiler? If the display is completely dead, try checking the fuse in the spur. If that’s OK, have a look on your main consumer unit to see if any of the switches are pointing down. If they are, try to flick them back up and see if the boiler starts.
- Have you tried to reset the boiler? Sometimes, just like on our phones, something on the control chip can go a little haywire and they need to be reset. Who knows why? One of life’s mysteries, but if it works, it could save you a ton of time.