Help! Advice needed regarding heating

[shamila]

I bought a George Wimpey 3 floored townhome in December 2006. Since the day I moved in I have had problems with the heating on the ground floor. There is a bedroom , and hallway adjacent to a carport and a utility room. To date , despite the central heating working on the other floors, the maximum I can heat up the hallway and ground floor bedroom is 14 degrees Centigrade. (This is with the thermostat on at 28) Despite repeated calls, letters and faxes to the wimpey site and head office I have had no satisfactory response. The head office and customer aftercare dept ( Beware of Wimpey aftercare- there is no such thing!) say that as there is still a site office , I should liase with them. The site team have acknowledged that there is a problem which they attribute to the hallway radiator being too small.Although they have said that the solution is apparently a bigger radiator in the hallway, (which they will apparently install) nothing is being done, despite repeated telephone calls from me to them. They just assure me they will do it when they can get a plumber. It seems really odd to me that being such a big company they can't seem to find a person to do the job. I am fed up, winter is approaching and I am in a situation where when it's cold I'm actually putting a fan heater on in the third bedroom along with central heating in the rest of the house.
Please, Please if anyone can give me some advice about how to get this sorted out I would be eternally grateful. Is there some sort of legal consumer rights advocacy group I can approach to get this sorted out?
Or do I need to keep pestering them? The site manager assures me that there is nothing wrong with the insulation in the house as it is cavity walled.
Thank you in advance for any advice.

[zednine]

hi

it sounds to me that the radiators are undersized,,

try turning all the rads off in the house except the rooms you have a problem with, the turn the heating on,,,, if the rooms are still cold, then the rads are too small

[SteveS]

Hi,
Contact the NHBC and the local council and ask what the minimum temperature a heating system should maintain.
I know that there are definately regulations on this and I think that the regulation is that a property should reach 19C within one hour - but that is just from memory and it is dependant on the outside temperature.

You could even try Corgi, or a larger heating company and ask them for the most up to date regulations in your area.

You will need to log the temperature too. You need to give the builder solid facts eg instead of 'the heating takes ages and is too cold', you need to be able to say 'after the heating has been on for 2 hours and the outside temperature is 16C my house is still at 16C'. Once you have this information use it with the NHBC etc.
www.Pishsimmon.com