How to deal with boiler breakdowns

It’s never any fun when your boiler breaks down, especially when you’re relying on it to heat your home and hot water during the cold winter months. The best way to plan for a potential boiler breakdown is by taking out emergency boiler cover. That way, if something goes wrong, you’ll simply be able to phone up your insurance provider and they’ll send out a qualified boiler engineer to fix your boiler in a matter of hours. There are plenty of different boiler cover packages to choose from to meet your needs and budget, as well as central heating boiler packs that provide insurance for your entire system.

But what if you don’t have any sort of boiler cover and something goes wrong? Lucky for you, we’ve got some great tips on how to keep your home habitable if your plumbing and heating fails.

Boiler Breakdown: Heat your home with alternative methods

If your boiler or central heating has broken, you’ll need to find another way to keep your house warm. Make use of an open fire or gas fire if you’ve got one. They’ll prove an effective alternative to gas boiler heating for warming up your home.

For properties without alternative heating sources, electric heating will be the way to go. Space heaters, which you can simply plug in and use will quickly raise the temperature of your home. However, they are far more expensive to run than central heating, so you’ll only want to use them to tide you over until your central heating is fixed.

Boiler broke? How to keep warm

Want to minimise the cost of heating your home if your boiler has failed? Here are a few other ways you can keep warm…

Draught proof your home

Make sure your home isn’t draughty by patching up any holes in the walls, hanging thicker curtains and laying draught excluders in front of your doors. Draught proofing products are fairly inexpensive but could save you a lot of money by preventing heat from escaping from your home.

Wrap up warm

Don’t be ashamed to wear a coat, hat and gloves inside your home if it’s what you need to do to keep warm when your boiler breaks. There’s no judgement here, in fact, it’s the most sensible thing you can do!

Use hot water bottles

Hot water bottles are great for keeping warm when you haven’t got central heating and they’re much cheaper than running an electric space heater. If your home is particularly cold, carry one around with you and pop one in your bed at night to warm it up before you go to sleep.

Boiler breakdown: How to get hot water

If your boiler is responsible for heating your water, as well as your radiators, you could be in a spot of bother if it malfunctions. Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to create hot water until a gas engineer is available to take a look at your system.