Plumbers in Wombwell, Barnsley

Two very different kinds of heating system in one S73 town

Wombwell sits roughly four and a half miles south-east of Barnsley town centre, on the line of the old Dearne and Dove Canal and with its own station on the Penistone and Hallam lines. The town grew quickly from the 1850s and 1860s as coal mines, clay works and brickyards opened, and that late-Victorian expansion still shows in the terraced streets around the older centre.

What makes Wombwell unusual is how much has been built here recently as well. Housing developments have gone up steadily over the last decade or so off Roy Kilner Road, Barnsley Road, Lundhill Road, Pitt Street and Gypsy Lane, so a single street round the corner from a Victorian terrace may be a modern estate barely a few years old. The two need genuinely different work. Older properties tend to bring us open-vented systems and part-completed upgrades — a cylinder still sitting in the airing cupboard, small-bore pipework that has been extended piecemeal, cold spots and sludge in the radiators. Newer houses bring sealed systems under manufacturer warranty, pressure loss, and fault codes that need reading properly rather than guessing at.

One more thing worth saying about this part of the Dearne valley: parts of Wombwell flooded in June 2007 when the River Dove burst its banks, and low-lying ground-floor plumbing is something we treat with respect here. If you have had water in before, we will look at where services run and what can sensibly be raised or protected. Every gas job is carried out by a Gas Safe registered engineer, and we explain what we have found before we start.