Boiler service in Dartford

The houses in Dartford

Four eras, two postcodes

Dartford is the hardest town I cover to generalise about, and that is the useful thing to know about it. The last census put its housing at roughly a third terraced, a third semi-detached, a seventh detached and a quarter flats, which is about as evenly spread as a town gets. The oldest part is the red-brick terracing near the centre, solid-walled and roofed in slate. Interwar semis run south through Wilmington, Hawley and Sutton-at-Hone. Temple Hill, north-east of the centre, went up after the war to rehouse people bombed out of their homes, and the Princes Road corridor carries more of the same. Then there is Ebbsfleet Valley, designated a garden city in 2014 with fifteen thousand homes planned and thousands more approved since, most of it inside this borough.

Why the address tells me less here

In most of the towns I work in I can make a decent guess at the job from the postcode. In DA1 and DA2 I genuinely cannot, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. A solid-walled terrace near the centre loses heat through its fabric, which means a properly sized boiler can still leave the house feeling cold, and the answer is a diagnosis rather than a bigger unit. The post-war estate houses behave differently again, simple layouts with combi conversions of varying age. The interwar semis further out are loft territory, where the recurring callouts are condensate pipes freezing in a cold loft and flue seals disturbed when a roof was re-covered. And the new Ebbsfleet properties are not always boiler work at all: a good number run communal heat networks with a heat interface unit instead, which is metering and HIU faults, a different job with different rules. Tell me which of those four you live in and the conversation gets a lot shorter.