How to Check Your Heating is Ready for Winter

Contributed post

As the colder weeks roll forward, it’s important to make sure that your heating system is as prepared and working correctly ahead of the colder temperatures as possible. You don’t want to find yourself in the middle of a storm, but when they’re heating on inside the house.

The problem is that you need to be able to check your heating is ready, but you may not have an appointment with your professional gas fitters until next month. There is plenty that you can do on your own though before you have to call an engineer to come in and check or a gas fitter to redo the boiler. Let’s take a look at how to check your heating is ready for winter.

1. Check the water pressure first. Checking out the water pressure on your boiler is a good place to start. You just have to look at the boiler’s pressure gauge. The correct pressure should be somewhere between 1:00 and 2:00 bars, but you should check with the instructions of your boiler to verify the ideal pressure for your specific boiler. If it’s too high, you can lower it just by bleeding the radiators. If it’s too low, you need to repressurise your boiler per the manufacturer’s instructions. Never do this on your own. If you’re in any kind of doubt, though, you should always hire a professional.
2. Check your radiators. If you want to check that your heating is ready for winter, you need to look beyond your boiler and look at the radiators too. Turn your heating on and check that every radiator in your home is heating up from the bottom to the top evenly. If you find that all of them, or even some of them have some cold spots or a cold towards the top of the radiator, they need to be bled. This is easily done and there are plenty of YouTube videos to show you how to bleed a radiator.
3. Carbon monoxide detectors.You should be checking your fire alarms and your carbon monoxide detectors at least twice a year regardless, but if you have them, checking them all at this point in the year is important. Carbon monoxide is odorless, which means that you need to have a detector to pick it up.If there are replaceable batteries in your carbon monoxide detectors, this is the time to do that.
4. Check the mode of your boiler. Some boilers have a summer mode, and if yours is set to summer mode in the winter, that’s not going to be ideal. The best thing that you can do is to switch it back to winter mode and make sure that you’re following the manufacturer’s instructions to do this. You don’t want to have a boiler that’s stuck in the wrong season. 

Making sure that your house is ready for the winter is just part and parcel of the colder months ahead. Check your heating, check your boiler and speak to registered gas fitters or heating professionals to ensure it’s working.