Landlords

Peter Lennard Heating Repairs & Servicing

Landlords

I can carry out the annual Landlord's Gas Safety Report that is required by law.

Landlords have a duty under the Gas Safety (Installation & Use) Regulations 1998 to have an annual safety check on all gas appliances that they are responsible for. The legal requirements are detailed in Section 36, Duties of Landlords.

The Health and Safety Executive has a comprehensive gas safety website with an excellent plain english legal advice page for Landlords, Tenants, Letting Agents and Owner Occupiers.

Quite often if safety problems are discovered they are not necessarily difficult or expensive to correct. A typical fault might be an undersized airbrick, requiring minor work by a small builder or installation of a window vent easily carried out by a glazier without removing a window pane. So, there simply isn't any point in ignoring the regulations. It is a criminal offence for a landlord not to have a gas safety check carried out when one is required, and tenants could be placed in danger.

I can carry out such safety checks, (unless the property also has a gas fire, for which category I am not registered), and I normally do the check at the same time as carrying out a service, for several reasons:

1) Several matters are duplicated in the safety check and service - e.g. checking of gas rates, efficacy of the flue and ventilation, so once the Gas Safety Check has been done it is a false economy not to sort out any servicing problems that ought to be attended to.

2) It is cheaper to combine a service and safety check on one visit than to do them separately.

3) Combination boilers are relatively complex machines and if any faults are left unattended it is likely that they will cause other parts of the boiler to fail, hence it is a false economy only to have a Gas Safety Check without a service at the same time. Disatisfied tenants left with no hot water or heating are more likely to move creating void properties.

Finally, if you want to read my collected sayings of Landlords, click here. Not many so far, but watch this space! If you have any to add, or some Landlord jokes, send me an email . Despite such poking of fun at landlords I do have many excellent landlord customers... if they haven't all deserted me after reading my jokes section!