Landlords are continuing to find themselves in hot water when it comes to trying to service their own gas boilers.

Another landlord, this one living in Colchester, has fallen foul of The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) and has been fined a total of £11,300 by Colchester Magistrates Court for five breaches of the Gas Safety (Installation & Use) Regulations 1998. He was also ordered to pay costs of £8,700.

The charges were brought after the landlord fiddled around with gas boilers in his own rented properties. Two of the charges concerned carrying out work on a gas boiler whilst not competent to do so. In other words, the landlord was not a qualified gas engineer who was not, legally, able to service, or repair a gas device.

This has been the law for years and the Gas Safety Register, run by The Health and Safety Executive HSE, is now the official body which controls a list of qualified engineers and their status, and training. It took over from the CORGI gas registration process on 1st April 2009. The register should make it easier to find a qualified service engineer and more details are available at www.gassaferegister.co.uk, or telephone 0800 408 5500.

The landlord was also found guilty over not making sure a boiler was kept in a safe condition, for not keeping records of any safety checks and not providing for a tenant a safety check record.

An HSE Inspector, Mr Matthew Tackling, said: “The HSE will not hesitate to prosecute landlords who fail to take their responsibilities for safety to their tenants seriously and to follow up on those who fail to co-operate with any investigation or fail to appear in court.”

The HSE has once again issued a reminder to landlords and property developers to bear in mind that although there is currently an economic recession, they should not forget their commitments and responsibilities as regards gas devices.

Guest Article by Neil Camp

Residential landlords are confused as to whether they can apply for a tax allowance should they wish to replace old boilers in their rental properties.

A number of professional bodies are voicing criticism over the current tax laws which they say are confusing. It comes down to whether all the costs (direct and related) of a boiler replacement in a residential property can be claimed as part of the ten per cent tax deduction which is allowed for improvements made to a rental property. The Revenue, claim the professional bodies, are not making matters clear and this is only having an adverse effect on landlords replacing new boilers for old.

New condensing boilers can be up to 40% more efficient than old boilers and, say the experts, if the landlords of private homes were encouraged to replace more through advantageous tax concessions, then it would greatly benefit the environment.

And what’s more, it might help curb a growing trend for landlords, in these harder economic times, to try and repair their old boilers themselves in order to put back their eventual replacement. A report from the Gas Safe Register concluded that landlords making DIY boiler repairs were on the increase and were putting tenants at risk. Landlords should be well aware, say the authorities, that only CORGI registered engineers are allowed, by law, to work on boilers, in order to try and reduce the number of deaths caused by carbon monoxide poisoning every year.

So, say the experts, good visible tax benefits will have the dual effect of helping the environment and tenant safety.

Guest Article by Neil Camp

Right, this sort of question is one of those tricky little conundrums that really depends on various factors and your personal situation.

And like most insurance situations, you have to weigh up what suits you in terms of the risks involved.

Let’s take the boiler. Nowadays they are quite complicated pieces of kit and whereas one might last 15 years without a hitch, another one might break down on regular intervals. And who’s to stay why. Take cars for example. We’ve all known cars that go on for mile after mile without so much as a kind word. Yet we’ve known others that breakdown if it’s raining.

So, if you own a modern, latest specification boiler with a nice guarantee, then maybe you are safe at least for the first year. But do read the small print on the guarantee as, let’s be honest, a number of companies have a way of getting out of any commitment if they can.

But once out of the guarantee period, you are then starting to run the risk of what happens if a major failure occurs? Modern new boilers can cost anywhere from £250 to £3,000, depending on the size of your property. So, if you have an expensive boiler, then you might want it covered. Mind you, even if you don’t have an expensive boiler, the cost of replacement could still be, in relevant terms, a fortune, given your own personal budget. What effectively an insurance plan does, is to spread the cost of a new boiler over a number of months, if you assume the worse and think that your boiler will inevitably breakdown. And, that’s assuming it requires a complete replacement, rather than just parts.

So lets say you take out a monthly policy of between £10 and £15 a month, which will cost you between £120 and £180 a year; it’s cheap if you’re boiler breaks down. But let’s say it doesn’t break down for five years, then the total cost would have been £600 to £900, maybe twice as much as a new boiler for an average house. But, who can say? It’s your judgement and your risk.

But, if there’s one strong argument for getting insurance, it’s that you have someone else paying your boiler attention. Boilers should be serviced once a year, otherwise you not only run the risk of having an inefficient boiler which is costing you more money than it should, but you are risking your own and your families’ lives. A faulty boiler can kill; it’s that simple. Carbon monoxide poisoning from faulty boilers kills around 30 people in the U.K. every year.

Now, to get your boiler serviced, you have to remember to book and arrange a Corgi-registered engineer to do the job. Boiler servicing is, by law, a job for a professional. DIY servicing certainly is not allowed and should not be tried, nor can some odd-job man do it for you.

So, a boiler service can set you back at least £95, so if you think that an insurance plan can start from £120 (and includes a yearly service), then it would make sense to pay that bit extra, spread over monthly payments anyway. And apart from the economic argument, you also have someone who will remind you about your service and arrange to do it. Which saves the hassle of you remembering your annual service and having to negotiate a service price.

Right, you pays your money and takes your choice, but on balance, a good boiler insurance seems sensible not only for your wallet, but also for your health.

Guest Article by Neil Camp

A south coast landlord faces jail after failing to produce the necessary paperwork for gas boilers in his rented properties.

At a recent magistrates hearing the man pleaded poverty, saying he was too broke to afford the checks on the boilers which would amount to nearly £2,000.

His court appearance followed on from one last October when he had been fined some £24,000, and legal costs of around £13,000, on 12 counts of failing to supply paperwork showing the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) that a Corgi-registered engineer had passed the gas boilers in question fit for use. He had at that time been given a court order to comply with the regulations and get the boilers inspected.

The man had 12 flats originally, but had since sold ten for nearly £1m, keeping just two, which are unoccupied.

In the recent hearing the man claimed he could not afford the boiler inspections as he had no money.

It was made clear in court that the HSE was worried about the possible effects of carbon monoxide poisoning on the tenants due to a faulty boiler. It was pointed out that carbon monoxide poisoning from gas boilers accounted for over 30 deaths a year in the U.K.

He had been originally asked in February 2007 by the HSE to provide the necessary documents for the boilers, as a landlord of properties is legally entitled to do.

The man’s solicitor claimed his client had no funds, or income, to get the work carried and therefore could not comply with the court’s orders.

Magistrates warned him that he risked going to prison and he was given conditional bail until the date set for sentencing.

Guest Article by Neil Camp

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