There is a week every autumn — usually somewhere in October — when the temperature drops properly for the first time and half of Gloucestershire turns the heating on together. It is comfortably our busiest week of the year, and almost none of the calls are about something that broke that morning. They are about things that quietly stopped working back in April, sat unnoticed all summer, and only announced themselves when the system was asked to do some work.
That is the whole argument for a September once-over. The same fault costs you an afternoon in September and a cold weekend in November. Here is what we would check, in the order we would check it.
1. Turn it on now, before you need it
The single most useful thing you can do this month takes ten minutes: put the heating on for half an hour and walk round the house with your hand on every radiator. You are not trying to get warm — you are taking an inventory. Which radiators heat up, which stay cold, which are hot at the top and cold at the bottom, which make noises they did not used to make. Write it down. That list is the difference between “the heating’s not right” and a diagnosis.
Do it now and anything you find is a booked appointment. Do it in November and it is an emergency call-out, competing with everybody else who left it.
2. Bleed the radiators that need it — and only those
A radiator that is hot at the bottom and cold at the top has air trapped in it, and bleeding is a genuinely simple job: radiator key, cloth, quarter turn, wait for the hiss to turn into water, close it. Work around the house from the lowest floor upwards.
Two things worth knowing. First, if you are bleeding the same radiator every few weeks, air is getting in from somewhere and that is a fault, not a chore — worth a look. Second, after bleeding several radiators the system pressure will have dropped, so check the gauge and top it back up to the pressure marked on it.
3. Free off the valves before they seize
Thermostatic radiator valves spend the summer sitting in one position, and the pin underneath sticks. The radiator then either never warms up or never turns off. You can often prevent it in advance: take the head off and gently work the pin up and down a few times, or simply run the valves fully open and fully closed a couple of times before the season starts.
A seized valve is a small part and a short visit. A seized valve discovered in December, on the coldest radiator in the house, is a much less pleasant conversation.
4. Look at the hot water cylinder, if you have one
If your hot water comes from a cylinder in an airing cupboard, September is a good time to look at it properly. Check the insulating jacket is intact and actually strapped on, look for any sign of weeping or staining around the fittings, and check the cylinder thermostat is set sensibly — around 60°C, which is hot enough to keep the water safe and not so hot that every tap is a scalding risk.
If your cylinder is old, slow to recover or you are constantly running out of hot water halfway through the second shower, that is worth a conversation before winter rather than during it. We wrote about the difference between unvented and vented cylinders earlier this month if you are weighing up a replacement.
5. Find your stopcock — genuinely
Ask most households where the internal stopcock is and you get a confident answer that turns out to be wrong. Find it, make sure it actually turns, and make sure everyone in the house knows where it is. If it is stiff, do not force it — a stopcock that snaps is a considerably worse evening than a stopcock that is stiff.
This is thirty seconds of work that occasionally saves a ceiling. Winter is when pipes fail, and the first ninety seconds of a burst decides how much damage you are cleaning up.
6. Deal with the outside tap and anything exposed
Outside taps, pipework in unheated garages, and anything running through a loft are the first casualties of a hard frost. If you have an isolating valve for the outside tap, turn it off and drain the tap down. Check that lagging in the loft is still where somebody put it, rather than where a stored suitcase pushed it three years ago.
7. If the radiators are cold at the bottom, that is sludge
A radiator that is warm across the top and stubbornly cold along the bottom edge is usually full of magnetite sludge, and no amount of bleeding will touch it — bleeding removes air, and this is not air. That is the case for a power flush, and there is a longer explanation in our post on why late summer is the right time to clean a heating system.
One honest note about your boiler
Everything above is the wet side of your heating: radiators, valves, pipework, cylinders. Your annual boiler service is a separate job and a legal one — work on a gas appliance must be carried out by a Gas Safe registered engineer, and you can check any engineer’s registration on the Gas Safe Register. Book that in alongside these checks. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you assume otherwise.
Want us to do the once-over?
If you would rather someone else crawl round the radiators, we cover Cheltenham, Gloucester and the surrounding towns and villages for central heating and general plumbing. Quotes are free, there is no call-out fee, and September appointments are considerably easier to come by than November ones. Call 07386 705571 or ask for a quote online.