Keep to the Law - Service your Boiler Regularly

Most people know the importance of servicing your boiler to maintain a healthy central heating system. One way of ensuring the user sticks to the schedule of periodic servicing is to use the service interval time controls as a reminder, to ensure they keep to the recommended servicing schedule.

Over the last several years we have seen a major drive towards upgrading old boilers to new high efficiency boilers to save energy and reduce carbon emissions. Still, there was notably little focus put on the importance of regular boiler maintenance and central heating system servicing.

It important to ensure your domestic boiler and central heating system is kept in good condition through periodic servicing, which provides the following benefits:

* Ensure that the boiler delivers good output even at maximum load times. Good maintenance ensures the system is efficient and reliable throughout the year, and delivers good performance even in the coldest winter days.

* Ensure that as a landlord or property owner, you keep within the law which requires you to maintain the boiler and the central heating system in good operating condition.

Gas Regulation 36 from the 1994 Gas Safety, Installation and Use Regulations states that:

*Owners of gas appliances must make sure that the appliances are kept in safe operating order that eliminates the risk of injury to people using the property. The owner has to make sure that the appliances are checked periodically every twelve months.

* Landlords must ensure that all gas fittings within the property are kept in safe condition which prevents the risk of injury to anybody using the property.

* Without predisposition to the above points, a landlord must make sure that all gas appliances (including the flues) are checked within twelve months from the point of installation and at periodic intervals of no more than twelve months apart (whether such check was done subject to these Regulations or not).

Evidence from the marketplace indicates that it is difficult to enforce these Regulations in the case of private households. It is estimated that there are around 25 million households in the UK and many of them are either unaware of their legal obligation or they are simply delaying the checks due to financial difficulties. There are talks of imposing penalties in cases of accidents that involve damage or injury due to neglect on the side of the home owner.

There are automatic reminding mechanisms that help homeowners or tenants to keep up to the periodic maintenance schedule. Some use a flag up mechanism that raises the flag when it is time to check the system. Other systems take a more drastic route and physically turn the system off if the scheduled service was not done on time, displaying a local engineer's phone number for an emergency service.

Automatic scheduling mechanisms actually provide a short grace period beyond the scheduled service if one was not carried out. It is, however, imperative that the owner of the system or the tenant arranges for a service engineer as soon as possible before the system actually shuts itself down.

According to the records by boiler servicing companies, calls for boiler servicing rise dramatically the closer it gets to the winter period, as systems are restarted after a long break for the summer. Using an automatic reminder for calling an engineer reduces scheduling crunches and un-serviced systems waiting for an engineer.