Heating Engineer in Westward Ho!, North Devon

Westward Ho! is the only place name in Britain with an exclamation mark in it, borrowed from Charles Kingsley's 1855 novel and given to a resort that was built, more or less from nothing, to cash in 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're both practical.

Salt air is hard on the outside of a heating system. Properties facing the Atlantic here take a constant salt load. Flue terminals corrode, external condensate pipework degrades faster than it would 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's usually where the trouble starts.

Half the housing stock is empty for half the year. A boiler that's sat unused since October gets fired up at Easter and asked to run flat out 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'm 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 fall under the same requirement as a residential tenancy, which surprises a lot of owners round here.

The practical problem is access, not the certificate. Tell me your changeover days and I'll work around them, or we'll do it in the closed season and get the service and the CP12 done in one appointment. If you use a managing agent, I'm happy to deal with them directly and send the certificate over by email the same day.

You'll get an answer. Ring or message during the working day and you'll hear back the same day; evenings and weekends, it'll be the next working day. And if it isn't a job for me, I'll tell you that and point you at someone who can help, rather than going quiet on you.

When you book, I'll confirm it and give you a two-hour window rather than a whole day sat at home waiting. On the morning you get a text with a tracking link, so you can see where I've got to instead of wondering. Traffic and the job before yours are real, so it's a window rather than a promise to the minute, but if it slips you'll hear it from me first.