Heating Engineer in Instow, North Devon

Instow sits on the east bank of the Torridge looking across at Appledore, with the sand, Marine Parade and the Tarka Trail running along the old railway line behind it. It is a small village, well under a thousand residents, but the housing is not small: a lot of Instow is substantial detached property, a good proportion of it second homes and holiday lets.

Larger houses mean more heating system to go wrong. Instow has more than its share of unvented hot water cylinders, multiple bathrooms, and systems with two or three heating zones. Those systems are reliable when they are maintained and expensive to ignore, and the annual G3 cylinder service is the part most owners do not know is a legal requirement on an unvented cylinder.

I am George Lane, Gas Safe registered and G3 qualified for unvented cylinders. Instow is about 18 miles by road from South Molton, around half an hour, and I pass it regularly between Barnstaple and Bideford.

An empty property in winter is the usual source of a spring breakdown. Frost protection set properly, a system left at a holding temperature rather than fully off, and a service before the season starts will remove most of the risk. If you let the property, the CP12 is due every 12 months and I will time it around a changeover so nobody loses a booking.