Maintenance of gas appliances is vital to you and your family’s safety. In simple words, if you fail to take good care of your boiler or any other gas appliance, you risk them evolving into a significant threat to the health and safety of you and your family. It’s recommended that a certified engineer be hired to service the boilers once a year. Surprisingly, almost 66.6% of the UK’s boilers haven’t been serviced in the last year.

The role of carbon monoxide

If you don’t stay on top of maintaining your boiler, and other gas appliances, what exactly could go wrong? The biggest risk is death by carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide is referred to as the “silent killer” because it doesn’t have any smell or taste, yet it’s poisonous, deadly.

Any fuel that burns, be it coal, wood, gas, or anything else, releases carbon dioxide as a by-product of the burning process. However, in certain conditions where the fuel cannot burn as efficiently as it normally would, it gives off carbon monoxide, instead.

Carbon dioxide is one of the leading gases that make up the air around us (it’s also the leading culprit behind global warming). However, its cousin, carbon monoxide, isn’t harmless by any stretch of the imagination. When released in an enclosed space, for instance, a room in a house, anyone who breathes it in will begin experiencing tiredness, headaches, nausea, dizziness, and shortness of breath. This can lead shortly to unconsciousness and even death, if a door and windows aren’t opened to let the gas dissipate fast. In the UK, there are roughly 60 fatalities resulting from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning yearly.

How do I determine if my boiler is emitting carbon monoxide?

Besides regular servicing, installing a detector is the best way to safeguard your family from carbon monoxide poisoning. Choose a carbon monoxide alarm that meets industry standards and works on the same principles as a smoke detector.

There are also sure signs to look for, which may signify that your boiler isn’t burning as efficiently as it should do – which is when carbon monoxide emissions begin. Your pilot light changing colour from blue to orange or yellow is the clearest indication. Call a qualified engineer immediately when you spot this. You might also see signs of soot with a coat-like musty smell. To help you get in the habit of having your boiler serviced every year, WeServe 247 provides a great value boiler and heating cover at £11.00 per month. Call us today at 0800 599 9777 for more information.

However, this doesn’t mean that you blindly shell out money on breakdown cover. Of course, every pound we can save on motoring is a bonus. We also want to ensure we’re paying for a service that’ll meet our requirements when and if we call it. So if you’re looking for breakdown cover, keep these things in mind to ensure you get the right service at the best possible value.

1. Location

No, we haven’t veered off into a property blog. While it may seem strange, location is an important consideration when choosing breakdown cover. By location, we mean the place where your car will have a greater probability of failing.

Can you guess the most common location that a breakdown service attends? It’s the motorist’s own home. Still, the majority of basic roadside assistance policies don’t offer coverage for a home start. So if there’s even a 30% probability of your car not starting on your own driveway, ask yourself, are you getting a decent value from the cheapest available option?

2. You get what you pay for – but is it something you really need?

Imagine that you wake up one morning, and that your car won’t start. You’ll quickly realise that paying less for basic roadside assistance is false economy. If your car breaks down a lot further from where you live, things can get even worse. With just the roadside assistance, the average cost of a callout over 100 miles from home is almost double that of getting your car started on your own driveway.

This takes into consideration that with the most basic plans, you’ll just be towed to a local garage. If fixing your vehicle instantly isn’t possible, you’ll have to factor in getting a train or bus home, or probably find overnight accommodation. Some national recovery policies will give you the option of towing the vehicle to your destination, towing it back home, or even paying for a car hire or accommodation while your vehicle is being repaired.

While this is all very attractive, it comes at a cost. If you don’t regularly drive over 100 miles from home, you may be paying more for benefits you may never need. Simply put, try matching your breakdown cover to your driving routines.

3. Don’t go easy on your research Instead of being distracted by every marketing spiel on the sales pages, why not spend some time reading customer reviews online? It’s a great way to find out what a specific service actually offers. Response time is one thing you should look out for, as customers will tend to get extremely annoyed at how long they were left waiting. They will be quite complimentary about how quickly someone catered to them, if the response time is short. Obviously, all of us a fast response from a breakdown service, so try and read the reviews to pick the quickest of them all.