Heating Engineer in Westward Ho!, North Devon

Westward Ho! is the only place name in Britain with an exclamation mark in it, taken from Charles Kingsley's 1855 novel and given to a resort that was built, more or less from nothing, to capitalise on the book. That origin still shapes the place: a Victorian resort core, later seafront apartment blocks, and a very high proportion of holiday lets and second homes behind them.

Two things follow from that, and they are both practical.

Salt air is hard on the outside of a heating system. Properties facing the Atlantic here get a constant salt load. Flue terminals corrode, external condensate pipework degrades faster than it does inland, and boiler cases in garages and outbuildings pick up rust at the fixings. On a seafront property I always look at the flue terminal from outside, not just at the appliance, because that is where the problem usually starts.

Half the housing stock is empty for half the year. A boiler that sat unused from October gets fired up at Easter and asked to run at full tilt for six months. Frozen condensate pipes in January and start-of-season lockouts in April are both routine here, and both are largely preventable with a pre-season service in February or March.

I am George Lane, Gas Safe registered, working on mains gas. Westward Ho! is about 21 miles by road from South Molton, roughly half an hour.

If you let the property out, even for a few weeks a year, you need a landlord gas safety certificate renewed every 12 months for every gas appliance. Holiday lets are covered by the same requirement as a residential tenancy, which surprises a lot of owners here.

The practical problem is access, not the certificate. Tell me the changeover days and I will work around them, or arrange the visit for the closed season and do the service and the CP12 in one appointment. If you use a managing agent, I can deal with them directly and send the certificate by email the same day.