Water Heater Repair in London

Water heater repair in London for immersion heaters, electric point-of-use units and instantaneous heaters.

It is £110 for the first hour and £45 for each extra half hour, plus the cost of parts, the same at any hour, with no call-out fee. Most faults are one part: an element, a thermostat or a valve, and common parts are carried on the van.

Water heater repair in London: what the price includes

• Electric units. Instantaneous and stored, domestic and light commercial.
• Immersion specialists. Elements and thermostats swapped same-visit, the most common fix on this page.
• Scale management. In hard-water London, scale kills elements young; we descale and advise on protection worth having.
• When it is beyond repair. If a unit is not worth fixing we say so on the visit and swap it like-for-like where that suits. For a new or upgraded water heater, see our water heater installation page.
• Point-of-use, instantaneous and storage all behave differently. An under-sink 10 litre unit, a wall-mounted instantaneous heater and a vented storage heater fail in completely different ways and take different parts. Telling us the make and the type on the phone is often enough for us to arrive with the part already on the van.

Signs your water heater needs repair

Water that goes scalding and then cold points to the thermostat. Lukewarm water, or none at all, usually means the element has failed or its fuse has gone. If the electrics trip every time the heater switches on, the element has an earth fault and needs replacing: leave it switched off until then. A heater that takes far longer to reheat than it used to is often scaled up, which in London is the rule rather than the exception. Rumbling or knocking from a cylinder is sediment. Water dripping from the tank itself means the tank has perforated, and that is a replacement, not a repair. If you can smell gas near a gas water heater, ring the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999 first, open the windows and leave; once they have made it safe, the heater itself is work for a gas engineer, not for us.

What we repair, and what it usually costs

Electric under-sink and point-of-use heaters and wall-mounted instantaneous heaters are repaired the same way: we find the fault, and the price for the repair is agreed before any work starts. A dripping discharge pipe on a mains-pressure cylinder is a safety valve or expansion vessel problem, covered on our unvented cylinder page. If the honest answer is a new heater, we say so and you can compare it with a water heater installation quote.

Keeping a water heater going in hard water

Keep stored hot water at about 60°C: hot enough to stop bacteria, not so hot that it scales the element faster. Never switch on an immersion with the cylinder empty, because the element burns out in seconds. If the cylinder rumbles, it needs flushing, and our guide on flushing sediment from a water heater shows what that involves. Where the same element keeps failing, scale protection on the incoming supply is the fix that stops the repeat visits.

Local conditions we work around

Almost every London water-heater fault we attend traces back to scale. Elements fur until they burn out, thermostats read through a mineral layer and overshoot, and outlet flow drops as the deposits narrow the pipework. The good news is that most of it is repairable, descaling and an element are a fraction of a replacement, and the bad news is that it will recur on the same schedule unless the incoming hardness is addressed at the same time.

Covered across London

Wherever you are in the list below, the price is the same. Open your area for what tends to go wrong there.