Emergency plumber
Greenwich.

A large slice of Greenwich's housing is genuinely old. The streets around the town centre — Royal Hill, Gloucester Circus, Crooms Hill, Maze Hill — and the West Greenwich and Blackheath conservation areas are full of Georgian and Victorian terraces, many of them listed or in conservation zones. These properties often still carry substantial runs of original copper, frequently the original lead service pipe from the road, and gravity-fed hot water systems with cold-water tanks up in the loft. Pipework that's a century or more old is well past its design life, so pinhole leaks behind kitchen units, in airing cupboards and under bathroom floors are routine Greenwich emergency calls. Conservation and listed-building constraints also mean repairs need to be done carefully and sympathetically — not just quickly.

Greenwich sits in Thames Water's hard-water zone, and limescale shortens the life of every combi boiler, immersion heater and shower cartridge in the borough. Combis here often need their plate heat exchangers descaled or replaced earlier than the manufacturer estimates, and we see a constant stream of F22, F75 and equivalent scale-related boiler faults, plus furred-up TRVs and noisy, kettling boilers.

The other half of Greenwich is brand new. The Greenwich Peninsula around North Greenwich and the O2, Greenwich Millennium Village, the Kidbrooke Village regeneration and the Woolwich riverside developments are all sealed combi and system boilers, plastic pipework, communal cold mains and shared stacks. The failure modes are different — pressure loss, expansion-vessel failure, shower-cartridge wear, communal blockages — and we work with both managing agents and individual leaseholders across these blocks.