Emergency Call-OutsIn Manchester —No Heat, No Water, Leaks

Do not ring us first. Ring the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999 immediately. Turn the gas off at the meter if you can reach it safely, open windows and doors, do not operate electrical switches and do not use naked flames. Leave the property if the smell is strong.

Once the supply has been made safe, we can attend to diagnose and repair the appliance or installation and get the gas back on.

Close the stopcock. In most Manchester houses it is under the kitchen sink, in a downstairs cupboard, or in the hallway of a flat; there is usually also an external one near the boundary. Turning it clockwise shuts the incoming main.

If the water is coming from the heating rather than the mains, turn the heating off and, if the leak is at a radiator, close both valves at that radiator to isolate it. Put containers underneath, move furniture and lift what you can off the floor.

Where water is anywhere near light fittings, sockets or a consumer unit, isolate the electrics to that area at the fuse board. Water and electricity together escalate an expensive problem into a dangerous one.

Check the obvious first, because it costs nothing: is there power to the boiler, is the programmer calling for heat, is the thermostat set above room temperature, is there gas to other appliances, and what does the boiler pressure gauge read. A boiler below roughly one bar has often simply lost pressure.

Check the boiler display for a fault code and write it down — it narrows diagnosis considerably. In freezing weather a boiler that has locked out overnight is very often a frozen external condensate pipe, which can sometimes be thawed with warm (not boiling) water poured over the pipe.

If none of that restores it, ring. Do not keep resetting repeatedly — a boiler that locks out again immediately is telling you something, and resetting past it can make the eventual diagnosis harder.

The most common are boiler lockouts and total failures, pressure loss to the point the boiler will not fire, frozen condensate pipes, burst and leaking pipework, failed radiator valves, leaking cylinders and discharging relief valves, and total hot water failure from a stuck motorised valve or failed cylinder thermostat.

Where a part is needed that cannot be obtained immediately, the property is left safe and functional as far as possible — heating isolated from a leaking section, temporary hot water restored via an immersion where one exists — and a return is arranged as soon as the part is available.

Standard hours are 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday. Outside those hours the phone is answered for emergencies. We are a three-man team based in Stretford, not a national network, which means you get people who know the area and the housing stock — and it also means we will tell you honestly if we cannot get to you as fast as the situation needs, rather than leaving you waiting.

We cover Stretford, Sale, Old Trafford, Urmston, Flixton, Davyhulme, Chorlton, Manchester city centre, Salford, Eccles, Worsley, Swinton, Prestwich, Whitefield, Altrincham, Hale, Timperley, Stockport, Cheadle, Bramhall, Wilmslow and the Heatons.

Emergencies in rentals need two things: fast attendance and clear reporting. We take instructions from landlords and agents, deal directly with tenants on access, and report back on what was found, what was done and what remains outstanding.

Where an emergency reveals an appliance at the end of its life, you get a straight assessment and a replacement quote rather than a repair that will fail again during the same tenancy.

Most winter emergencies are predictable. Annual servicing catches pressure loss, failing expansion vessels and marginal components before they fail. Insulating or re-routing an exposed condensate pipe removes the single most common cause of a frozen lockout. Knowing where your stopcock is, and that it turns, converts a flood into a puddle.

After an emergency visit we will tell you which of these apply to your property. Not as a sales exercise — because attending the same house for the same fault next January helps nobody.