Politics, (renewable) Heating and Gas

Discussing Politics and Debunking Plumbing Myths

• Ben Margulies and Stewart Heller • Episode 3

Share episode

Send us a text

Ever wondered what a Conservative win in Uxbridge could mean for politics? Pull up a chair with Stuart and me as we dissect recent by-elections and speculate on the potential implications. We also navigate the murky waters of environmental standards, from the London Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to Manchester's proposed Clean Air Zone. We question the affordability of upgrading vehicles to meet these standards and debate whether electric vehicles are the ultimate solution, or just a temporary fix.

Not only that, but we also debunk some of the most common plumbing and heating myths. We dig deep into the responsibilities of the waterboard, the significance of minor leaks, and the misconceptions surrounding boilers and flushability of wipes. Pivoting to gas engineering, we discuss the critical importance of gas safety regulations and reveal common missteps that can lead to clogs. Plus, we explore the pivotal role of technology in streamlining gas rate calculations. Join us for this enlightening episode, brimming with expert tips and intriguing insights.

Ben:

Hi there, before we start, I just want to point out that I've lost my voice. I'm recording this a couple of days after the actual episode was recorded and I just want to say that's why my voice sounding a a bit iffy on the podcast. Also, for anyone who's listening to this on a podcast, which I think most of my our listeners are, and not on YouTube, then sometimes we reference that there's, sometimes we reference that look here we are and look how different we look or some such, and that's only because we were actually together and we were just commenting on, you know, the van and stuff. So if you want to actually see what's always happening, then you can see that on YouTube, where we will post our whole video. Thank you, bye. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Ben:

Hi, welcome to another episode of Politics. Renewable Heating and Gas. I'm Ben and I run BeeX press Plumbing and Heating and I'm based in North West London. I'm Gas Safe Registered, I'm working towards my MCS and I'm a Which Trusted Trader where I've won Trader of the Month previously.

Stewart:

Hi and I'm Stuart. I run H and H Gas Services based in Manchester and I'm also a Gas Safe Registered Engineer. Okay, Ben, let's get started.

Ben:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics, renewable Heating and Gas. It just took three times for me to get right. So today is an extra special episode because today Stewart and I are together in the van. As you can see, it's Stewart's van and that's because I have come up with my family for a family celebration to Manchester, which is where is. So, as our name suggests, politics we want to discuss the latest politics of what the by-elections happen today, on the 20th of July 23, and what they could really mean in our eyes. So, , there were three by-elections. The Conservatives only won one of them. The other one of the others was won by Labour and the other one by the Lib Dems. So what do you think that the Uxbridge win of the Conservatives really tells us?

Ben:

I don't know, I've not really followed it, to be honest. Okay, so obviously at the moment, everyone's very upset with the Conservatives Government or doesn't think the Conservative Government is doing its job very well. I actually think that Uxbridge was won by the Conservatives is because it's actually going to be affected by the Labour idea of the Ules expanding. I say Labour because the Mayor of London is Siddiq Khan, is Labour, although some Labour MPs in London don't like the idea either and because of the Conservatives being the only party who was against Ules, because of the extra cost that people are going to have to pay when Ules expands. Therefore, that's why we think Stuart and I think, yes, stuart, even though he doesn't know that he thinks this he does think that it's because it's too expensive, and that leads on to something, I think, which is very, very important, because if people are saying no to Ules, what are they saying no to Ules about? So Stuart being matched and saying nothing about what goes on in London how much?

Ben:

does Ules cost?

Stewart:

per day. I don't know. I'd imagine around £10 or something like that.

Ben:

Well done to it. So £12.50 per day if your vehicle is not within the certain grade. That that the mayor of London decides is good enough. I actually had to upgrade my own van in London because my old Renault was absolutely perfect and I'd ride very well. I'd have to pay £12.50 every day and driving around my normal area, so I thought forget that I needed to upgrade. Then the mayor of London gave us a £4,000 grant to scrap by my vehicle. My van was 10 years old I can't remember anymore so I scrapped the van, got the £4,000, put that down as a down payment for my current van, which I'm very happy with. But really I then you know I'm paying monthly for a van to replace my old van which I owned outright. So actually I'm paying a fortune a month, around £350 a month in order that I can have a vehicle which before I didn't have to pay a penny for it.

Stewart:

Well, there was actually a fresh air tax that was meant to be coming into Manchester, which also would have been in the older vehicles, especially HDVs, vans, lorries, buses and again I believe it would have been around the sort of £10 a day mark for a van, more than that for a lorry and a bus. And the reason they didn't end up doing it is because they also had a scrappage scheme, like they had in London, which they were meant to be giving money to vehicle owners to be able to upgrade and businesses to be able to upgrade their vehicles, but unfortunately local government didn't receive enough money from the government to be able to give everyone the correct amount of money or whatever it should have been. So the scheme is currently under review and has been for some time, but I believe by sort of 2025 or next couple of years they definitely want to be bringing it in like they do in London.

Ben:

I do think that the best way to get out of any of this is just to get an electric vehicle, but they'll send the issues, at least within our trade of electric vehicles so first of all, I really my age and range is a big one.

Ben:

Yeah, I mean, I would really like to buy my own van, a Ford Transit Custom, as an electric van. However, that doesn't exist yet. It's coming out in a few months time. But when it does, I'm expecting it cost a third more than the current van is. So, which is just a ridiculous thing, especially with the high interest rates we have now high interest rates we have now. So it's going to cost a fortune to be able to buy. So I don't know if I would switch, even if I could. And then you know, a lot of these vehicles say that they can travel 200 miles, but only if there's no weight in the back. And we I mean, how much weight do you reckon your van was?

Stewart:

It's got to be a couple of hundred kilo in tools and equipment and materials.

Ben:

Yeah, I must create easily half a tonne. And then there's the racking as well, which also weighs and gives it that yeah, I would create half a tonne just in tools and racking, and if I have a boil end cylinder inside there then it's going to go up.

Stewart:

And then there's also weather conditions. If it's cold, it definitely it can definitely kill the battery. If you put the air conditioning on, that will definitely lower the range and things like that as well.

Ben:

On the plus side, though. We don't tend to travel huge amounts of range. You don't tend to travel when we're going job to job. What?

Stewart:

is your sort of daily? How far do you go within sort of 15 miles, 20 miles, yeah, probably 20 miles max, yeah, so what sort of mileage are you doing today? Sort of maximum up to 90, 100 miles? Probably, not even, yeah. I mean, yeah, I can go up to sort of 90 to 100 miles a day on a very, very busy day.

Ben:

Yeah, but you're not going to be carrying a boiler and a cylinder in the back, that's true, you're carrying what you have now.

Stewart:

That's true, but if you get to charge the vehicle the day before, whatever.

Ben:

But that would just be the thing that you have to do. Just like you know when your drill runs dry, you know you see the drillers or your gas analyzer is losing battery. I always take the home at the end of the day and plug it in.

Stewart:

And then it lasts for the next 30 jobs.

Ben:

So so I think that's just something at the end of every day, like we plug in our phones or just plug in some mindsets will change in regards to that, I guess, but the technology is a little bit too new at the moment.

Stewart:

I think people are a bit hesitant to take it up right now.

Ben:

Yeah, I think people who are pro it will get it. The people who are not so pro it won't get it. Very similar to you, so we really wanted to. On this episode, we also want to talk about myths in the plumbing and heating world. So which is really great that we're doing this video together in a van, because when we say cylinder, you'll have no idea what we're talking about, because that's one of the myths, isn't it?

Stewart:

That is when most people, when you come into a property and you ask somebody where's your boiler, they take you straight upstairs to the airing cupboard, where the hot water tank or cylinder isn't they go? Look, there's my boiler.

Ben:

Yeah, and then I normally say to that I say no, I mean the white one that's hanging on the wall. Oh that's downstairs, exactly.

Stewart:

That's a very common one. Another one that's very common is as gas engineers, we obviously have to, you know, access the gas meter. We're able to do all our testing tightness and that by testing to check for leaks and things like that. And when you ask people to show you the gas meter, inevitably you're taken to the electric meter.

Ben:

Yeah, because people don't seem to know what a gas meter is. So I do find that. I find it really odd, though, because surely people know the difference between electricity and gas. Electricity is the hissy thing that comes out of the, out of the hob.

Stewart:

Electricity is what you turn the lights on. So you mean the gas is the hissy thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, oh right.

Ben:

So so, but maybe they just don't know what it is because all they see is a white box novel with numbers floating past and the gas meet is a big way thing or possibly white and with numbers going past, so maybe they just can't tell about it. For us it's so obvious because you can see the gas pipe. It's what we do day in, day out.

Stewart:

Yeah, all the words that you don't know what you're talking about. That's the emergency control valve for shutting off the gas supply to a property in case of a gas leak, or what do you?

Ben:

call the bit on top of the meter the governor. Yeah, the governor, but the governor yeah, the London way of saying yeah, definitely better.

Stewart:

Speaking of myths, another very common myths is you know flushable wipes. People think that you know you can flush wipes. Just because written flushable on the packet, it doesn't mean they're going to disintegrate like toilet paper, and it's probably one of the most common causes of of clogs and sewers and things like that.

Ben:

Also, pouring oil down the sink another big one an interesting thing that Stuart told me earlier today is about shared drains, which happens a lot in Manchester, also in London, on all the property. So do you want to just tell us about?

Stewart:

that, yeah, if you go. I mean, I can't speak for London. I think it's the Thames Valley water. Who's it? Who's it? Thames water?

Ben:

well, in Manchester we have one that's going bust.

Stewart:

All right, yeah, that one. So Manchester, we have United Utilities and I just had an interesting occurrence myself where I came to a property where the main sewer had backed up and normally you'd have to pay a drainage engineer to come with and to sort it out how much would a drainage? Engineer probably be about 95 pounds an hour so other companies out there like Dino, rod or whatever, and here spoke to you.

Stewart:

We believe the blockage was actually on the street so it would have been United Utilities or the waterboards problem. They had to deal with it. When would it be the customers? So up into the boundary where the drain exits the property, say it goes down a driver where joins the road in the main city sewer from that point onwards would actually be in the waterboards problem. And it's the same with the stop tap and water entering a property.

Stewart:

So if the stop tap is on the road then the customer doesn't have any responsibility for it. The the waterboard would have to maintain it and replace it in case it leaked or snapped or anything like that. So here, same with drains, it's where it kind of the boundary the property is. Normally it'd be the customers responsibility. But here the waterboard came out and said well, actually this is a shared drain where two properties going to the same drain on the street, so it's actually their responsibility to maintain. And they came out and they cleared it free of charge and then the customer would have had to pay anything up to sort of around 200 pounds plus to get that cleared by a company and they can read it as well.

Stewart:

So you could be three, four hundred pounds.

Ben:

So you can imagine the customers very, very happy so when Stuart says camera, it there's a CCTV camera that is sent down on flexible cable, on like a flexible hardened water proof obviously, and that goes through and they can actually see. Are there any cracks in the pipe? Have tree roots broken in? Are there any rats dead and horribly stuck?

Stewart:

I actually wrote down. I'll just see if there's any other interesting plumbing myths I can see this is Stuart doing some research.

Stewart:

Well, yes, I did send Ben a note of a couple of interesting plumbing myths. I'm just seeing if I can see what else I wrote down. If there's any others, right, yeah, another one was minor leaks, nothing to worry about. People think, right, well, if it's only dripping a little bit, what others? I'll just put a bucket underneath it and ignore it. That's never a good thing to do. Leaks only get worse. They don't cure, but they don't get better by themselves. They only get worse. And then one day you'll wake up and they'll just be a torrent of water coming through the ceiling.

Ben:

So if you noticed any signs of leak or can hear dripping or anything, always best to get a local recommended plumber out just to take a look so what would you say when it's not a leak that is coming from a radiator or you just hear, but a leak from a tap which is just dripping, dripping, dripping?

Stewart:

well, firstly it's if it's a leaking tap, it's a massive waste of water and if you're on a water to meet, it is costing you money and it will only get worse.

Ben:

I think it will cost around £120 a year if you just leave a dripping tap.

Stewart:

Well, I believe that's if toilets left running, you know the overflow is running into the bowl or something and that's just left. And I can only speak for Manchester. But I know United Utilities, manchester. If you go on their website, they actually have water devices which you can put in the toilet bowl and leave overnight and it will see if there's any water sort of running down into the toilet bowl to tell you if the toilet is running, because sometimes you may not be able to see it as it's only a very small trickle, but if you're on a water meter that's a considerable amount of water being wasted. So small leaks, it's always worth getting them seen to Don't just ignore them, because they won't go away by themselves and you can tell to that, although, yeah, I have been to jobs where the leak sorted itself out.

Ben:

A customer called us out, cancelled the appointment, so we never went. Six months later asked us to come and look at something else and whilst we were there they mentioned you know, we originally contacted you about this leak, but it's solved itself. We think that maybe it rusted and the rust caused it to stop leaking. I was like it's probably not good, but yeah, if it's not leaking now, then okay. I don't really know what to say to that, but that happens.

Stewart:

Another very common thing we come across is this is more in the plumbing world. I know we're both gas engineers and we mostly deal with gas, but we do obviously have a background in plumbers. We're both obviously qualified plumbers. People tend to pour oil down the sink used cooking oil and fat and grease, which is the worst thing you can do with it. I'll tell you what you should be doing with it in a minute. But then they justify it by saying well, I poured a kettle of hot water after it, which they believe sort of melts it away and makes it go away.

Stewart:

Oil is also like wipes. It's a terrible thing to put down the drain. It can cause clogs and bind with other things like wipes and tissues and things. They terrible clogs. The correct thing to do with the oil and the best thing to do is, if you finished, you know you're frying or anything like that. If it's only a small amount, if you can just soak it up in some paper towel or something and put it in the bin, or if it's a large amount of oil, what I would suggest is to keep the actual oil container, such as the bottle. Get a funnel, wait for the oil to be 100% cool. Tip that back into the bottle, put the lid on and replace that in your black bin for general household waste, because people often say, well, what do I do with my oil?

Ben:

and what I'd like to say to them is take an ounce of straight oil and pour it down the bin there but obviously. I've never said that.

Stewart:

I never will say that, no, I do not do that.

Ben:

Stu's got a great idea there, though. Okay, so I am a gas-affredaged engineer, as Stu says. As we've told you before, in order to be a gas-affredaged engineer, you need to reset your gas exams every five years, and my five years ends in this November 23rd. So I'm going to be sitting my ACS which I have no idea what that stands for and I will be redoing ACS plus core, yes, and that will allow me to then continue being a gas engineer and my registration details will stay the same.

Ben:

Now, parts of it are things that I don't necessarily use every day, and this is just reminding me. The training I'm doing reminds me of what I need to do. Part of it, for example, is a gas rate. So gas rates I do on every single boiler service. Every single time I install a boiler, I will do gas rates as part of the commissioning. It's very important the way that this tutor who's telling me how to do gas rates is advising me. He's very slightly different to the way I was taught five years ago and that I've been doing since then and also nowadays. How do you, how would you do gas?

Stewart:

rates. I was just pointing out this is Ben not Ben's first time resetting. He's been gas safe for 15 years, so this was actually his third time resetting his ACS, as you've got to do it every five years.

Ben:

Yes, plus the original. So yeah, it's my fourth time doing the exam. Yeah, okay, so, yeah. So it's just funny how things slightly changed from tutor to tutor.

Stewart:

And over the years, as well as regulations changed, and also nowadays everything's done on apps on your phone, so actually the maths isn't really these anymore. Years ago we had to know all the calculations down cold and we'd be there with a piece of pen and paper filling everything in and calculating everything, and it would take a long time. Yeah, but nowadays it's all done on my phone with an app.

Ben:

Yeah, so it's definitely much easier. When a boiler is installed, you might be told by the customer that we need to upgrade your gas pipe. So, stuart, why would we need to upgrade our gas pipes?

Stewart:

Well, I don't want to get too technical here for the listeners, but basically imagine you had a very old boiler that would have been quite a low kilowattage, say a 15 kilowatt boiler, and that would have had a very small gas pipe going to it, so that small gas pipe can only take a certain amount of gas through it to feed that boiler. And then you put a new boiler in which, say, was a 30 kilowatt or higher, higher flow rate, a higher amount of gas pressure to be able to go through it. So therefore the gas engineer may tell you that your gas pipe work also needs upgrading from a meter to the boiler, which can be, depending where the meter is situated in the house and how far the gas run is to the boiler, can add significant cost on to the whole boiler install. But it's becoming more and more common. I would say, as all the boilers are getting taken out and higher rated, better, more efficiency boilers are being put in A lot of times that the gas run does need to be upgraded. Do you not say?

Ben:

Yes, but I would not say that just because a bigger boiler is being put in makes it more efficient.

Stewart:

No, it's not necessarily that, I'm just. You know we're going to get too far into the regulations and everything because it can be confusing for the listeners. Yeah, I think we need to do a podcast explaining all the things. Probably it shows about flow rates and gas pressures and things like that.

Ben:

Oh yeah, I can imagine people really enjoying that stuff.

Stewart:

Well, maybe you know what I'm saying. I don't enjoy it. Why would they all?

Ben:

enjoy it, it's true. Yeah, so yeah, so as part of my gas safe reassessment there's a lot of other things which is frustrating that I have to redo because there's so few jobs that I go to that I will use, possibly, the you know how to test open fleas, open vented fleas, which you don't know what I'm talking about and I had rarely ever seen.

Stewart:

So it's really it's quite old-fashioned. You don't go across them much nowadays.

Ben:

Yeah, so why am I still having to do the training?

Stewart:

Well, to say open fleas long I think it's, because it's just fire you still get quite a lot, though. Yeah, probably you don't like backboyles and things like that. You don't come across so many nowadays.

Ben:

no, I mean, even if a customer were to call us up and say the first question they say is, do you service backboylers or fleas or gas fires? And we will normally say I'm sorry, no, just because they're quite a faff to do.

Stewart:

I mean, rather than not do it. It can be quite dirty as well when you pull them out from the fireplace and everything and normally there's no manual which tells you how to On the gas fires.

Ben:

you have to replace the coals in a very specific way, which is all in the manual which no one's kept.

Stewart:

Yeah, because you're talking as well, and all these gas fires are so old there's nothing on the eyes, yeah, it's only as old or whatever. You can't get parts and God forbid you were to break it. Anything was to break or, you know, snap when your hand is Because it gets old and brittle. You know, you just cannot get replacements and you would have to have that capping off the customer's fire.

Ben:

I just prefer not to get involved. So that's my MTS, which is happening in a couple of weeks time. I'm also going on low temperature training with a company called Nebe or NIDI. I have NIDI how do you say it? N-i-b-e. They are heat pump manufacturers and they've got very specific low temperature training which will enable me to design low temperature heating systems. So that would mean larger radiators normally, or underfloor heating all these exciting things that we want to get into.

Ben:

Anyway so that's, I think it's for the special episode of Politics. Renewable Heating and Gas in Stuart's van yes.

Stewart:

It's not often we get to see each other, but hopefully, maybe next time I'll come down to London and we can do an episode in Ben's van yes and hopefully we'll have got the audio a bit better by then, as well.

Ben:

Hopefully All right, then see you next time. Thank you.

Stewart:

Bye.

Ben:

And that's all from us. Join us next week for another discussion about Politics, renewable Heating and Gas. Don't forget to subscribe and share, and if you're on YouTube, don't forget to hit the like button.