Despite what they might claim, builders are rarely central heating experts and one Christmas period, this was brought home to me quite forcibly.

We were having an extension built to our house and the work was scheduled to run over the festive period. And the Christmas in question was a particularly cold affair.

And as always with these cases in these situations, the builders had reached a key stage the day before Christmas Eve, and the day before their fortnight’s holiday.

So, as the temperatures began to drop to the minus part of the gauge, the builders made their temporary adjustments to mothball the extension, but keep the main part of the house intact. To cut a long story short, there was lots of plastic and pieces of two by one holding up the walls. A typical building site in other words.

The trouble came when shortly before leaving the site, they had to make safe the flue from the gas boiler. This was situated in the kitchen and the flue ran from there, up on the old outside wall and upwards. As this wall was going to become an inside wall of the new extension, the flue was going to have to be moved anyway, but it had been taken off the wall to allow work to be carried out then fixed back again with duct tape. Duct tape might not last while the builders were away and snow falling, so they took it off the wall and ran it horizontally away from the house; a run of about eight metres, a little shorter than it’s previous run up to the sky.

Fine you might think and the builders answers to my worried protestations that it all looked a bit unstable, was the inevitable, don’t worry, we know what we’re doing.

As it turned out, they didn’t know what they were doing. Within hours of their leaving the fumes pouring out from underneath the boiler were unbearable. With the builders long gone, the gas company came out, took one look at the flue and closed the boiler down, and said in no uncertain terms it should not be operated again until a properly qualified engineer had fixed the flue; sometime after Christmas. They explained that the siting and type of flue is matched exactly to the type of boiler using it. You cannot simply play around with flues and expect them to operate efficiently. And if you do play around with them, you can easily gas yourself and the whole family.

So, there you have it. We spent the Christmas nearly freezing to death in a house which had no gas, and therefore no heat. And although we had an electric cooker, friends took pity on us and we stayed away quite a bit of the time.

But I had learnt a valuable lesson. Get the professionals in when it comes to the specialist jobs. And your boiler and central heating system, like nowadays the wiring in your house, should only be tackled by trained professionals who are legally entitled to do such work. And if that might mean health and safety gone mad, bear in mind that a boiler can as easily kill as a un-earthed cable.

My builders were decent blokes doing a great job, and had just done what they thought was best to get us through the fortnight when they would be away. But, I should have called in a Corgi qualified engineer to check the boiler and flue, making separate arrangements.

So, you live and learn. Don’t mess with you boiler.

Guest Article by Neil Camp