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FREE landlord softwareNow's the time when landlords start having sleepless nights about frozen pipes and broken boilers.
It would be worth checking the state of boilers and checking the lagging of pipes at properties.
Any rental properties that landlords currently have sat empty would be worth putting the central heating on at a low constant temperature to avoid any burst pipes or frozen boilers.
Be warned!
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5 comments:
And if your property is empty check the conditions of your landlord insurance to make sure you are still covered!
And if your property is empty, drain down all water systems until you find another tenant.
Strange but true:
The boiler on an empty property which I am working on cut out during the night of the first snowfall. As the property was empty I was not in a hurry to spend extra and call out an engineer/ plumber. On reading the boiler instruction manual it appears the Air Pressure Sensor was stuck. Now some of the options here were blockages to the flue. so I went outside and sure enough the flue had a winter coating of iced-over snow. So I got out a hot air gun and blew away the snow and ice from the Flue terminal but the boiler still kept cutting out. I re-read the instructions last night and noted that a blockage to the condensate pipe may also cause the effect - eg say it also got iced-up. But today all the snow melted from the vicinity of the boiler and its external bits and lo & behold the heating has come back to life. So does this mean I need to lag the external condensate pipe?? We never would have had this kind of problem with the good old-fashioned boilers since they gave off so much heat the snow and ice wouldn't get anywhere near!
I am a gas engineer based in London. Over the colder weeks I have been going to alot of customers properties. These customers have been complaining about boilers not working. The new condensing boilers have condensate pipes running outside and if not lagged or installed by a cowboy this will freeze over and the boiler will not work. Its an easy fix - boiler up a kettle and go outside and pour it over the condensate pipe. The pipe will unblock in seconds and the boiler will work. The post above regarding the blocked flue, it could be that the venturi pipes inside the boiler are blocked and just need to be blown through. Dirt often gets inside and the boiler will not function as no air to burn A job for a gas safe engineer though.
Don't forget the traceheating option. you need to do it properly but it's not terribly difficult. Basically, you can heat virtually any kind of pipes to prevent freezing and the major plus is that you only use a small amount of energy as you heat only the pipe and (for example) not the whole room. Loads of suppliers these days too so plenty of choice out there
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