Riding to the rescue: the accidental landlord turns to Youtube to learn about boiler pressure and how to fix it

In deepest winter the boiler fails. With her tenant shivering and the engineer too busy, the accidental landlord takes an online crash course, tools up and rides to the rescue
£695 a week: a three-bedroom terrace house in Darville Road, N16, with a large private rear garden, is available to rent through Carlton
Victoria Whitlock22 January 2019

No landlord approaches a call from a tenant reporting a broken-down boiler with anything other than dread.

If the call comes on one of the coldest days of winter, you can be certain that finding a heating engineer quickly will be almost impossible and, if you do find one, they’ll probably charge the earth.

When I saw that I had a missed call from the tenant I knew it was serious because in almost five years he has never once rung with a complaint.

He’d left a message to say he had just returned home after a long flight to a freezing flat — there was no heating or hot water.

I had been just about to step into a hot shower myself, but there was no way I could do that now.

I immediately called my heating engineer but, not surprisingly, the earliest he could come over was in 48 hours’ time.

I couldn’t leave the tenant that long without heating and hot water, but I didn’t want to resort to finding an engineer via Google in case I ended up with a cowboy.

So I got the tenant to text me a photo of the digital display panel on the boiler and, with the help of the internet, I worked out it was just low water pressure preventing it from firing up.

It didn’t seem a big deal so I found a YouTube video that showed me exactly how to re-pressurise the boiler and, filled with misplaced confidence and a rudimentary toolkit, I went to the flat to sort it myself.

Of course, when I got there I found the boiler looked nothing like the one on YouTube, even though it was the same make.

The chirpy guy on the video was telling me to turn a couple of taps to let more water into the boiler — but I couldn’t see any taps.

At one point the tenant stuck his head under the boiler and identified two nuts in roughly the same place as the taps on the video and while he hunted for a pair of pliers to give them a twist, I texted a photo of the nuts to my usual heating engineer to check we weren’t about to make a big mistake.

Fortunately, while the tenant was finding the pliers the heating engineer texted: “DON’T TOUCH THOSE, YOU’LL DRAIN THE BOILER!” Thank goodness he’d responded immediately.

Then I had a brainwave and called Vaillant, the boiler maker, to ask if they could talk us through repressurising the boiler.

They helped me locate a pair of taps, which were hidden in a cupboard behind a false panel — of course.

Then, with the tenant in the cupboard and me on the phone to Vaillant relaying the instructions to him — “open the top tap a quarter, now the bottom, just a little, a little bit more…” — we managed to get them open and within seconds the boiler had fired up.

So, my tenant got a working boiler and I got a bit of essential rudimentary knowledge on boiler technology.

Victoria Whitlock lets four properties in south London. To contact Victoria with your ideas or views, tweet @vicwhitlock.

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