There are plenty of advantages to renting rather than owning your own place. It gives you flexibility and freedom as well as the chance to move every couple of years without the hassle of buying and selling.

Plus, of course, with a good landlord, you know your heating, electrics and other essential equipment will be well maintained. if something goes wrong, you can pick up the phone and ask your letting agent to arrange the repair. That is a huge bonus, especially if the boiler doesn’t fire up when the weather gets cold.

But here at BestLet Anglia, we often find that, at the first cold snap, we get lots of calls from tenants with heating problems and we can’t get to them all as fast as we’d like. We have to address emergency cases first (our elderly tenants and those with very young children) which can mean other tenants will have to wait for a heating engineer to reach them.

So, here are a few things you can do now before the weather turns cold, to save your shivering when the winter arrives. You’ll need to be at home for around an hour and this works best at a cooler time of day.

1. Turn on the heating and turn up the thermostat. Does the boiler fire up at once?
2. Check in each room that radiator valves are open. Within a few minutes, you should be able to feel warmth arriving. Is every radiator warming up?
3. Wait around 45 minutes for everything to get properly warm. Is every radiator hot? Are they all hot right the way to the top?
4. Check that there is no sign of water seeping out from any of the radiators or around the boiler.

That’s all you need to do! If everything is working as it should, you know you’ll be waking up warm even during the hardest of frosts. And, if It doesn’t, you can report the problem now, while you don’t need the heating.

These simple tests mean you won’t have to wait in the cold if things aren’t working when you really need them. 

BestLet Anglia tenants are able to report faults via our online system, making it easier and faster to get things fixed. This tool allows you to report a problem via any device and provides videos and guides so you can resolve the most common problems yourself. 

If you want to see the benefits of renting via BestLet Anglia, visit our website at https://www.bestletanglia.co.uk/Tenants