Gas safety certificates in Bromley

Ours is £75 for up to three appliances at one address, which covers the great majority of Bromley flats and terraces, and £12 for each appliance beyond the third. Combined with a full boiler service it is £140, and portfolio landlords with five or more properties pay from £62. The national range quoted by cost guides is £60 to £90 with a London premium on top, so £75 sits at the middle of that rather than at the discount end where the number tends to grow once someone is on the doorstep.

Four things per appliance, plus one for the property. The property test is a tightness test on the whole installation from the meter, using a manometer, to prove there is no leak. Then for each appliance: that it is burning correctly, meaning operating pressure and gas rate against the data plate; that the products of combustion are leaving through the flue, meaning a flue flow test and a spillage test with a smoke match; that there is enough permanent ventilation for the appliance input rating; and that the safety devices, flame supervision included, shut the gas off when they should.

This is the most common reason a certificate lapses, and it is survivable provided you build the evidence trail. The Health and Safety Executive expects you to take all reasonable steps and to be able to prove it: written notice of the appointment, at least three attempts on different days and at different times, one of them by recorded delivery, and a dated engineer’s report for each attended visit showing nobody was home. We provide that dated no-access report after every attempt at no charge, and we will try evenings and Saturdays because that is when people are in. What you must not do is force entry, and you must not simply stop trying — the duty continues until the check is done.

This is where a missed certificate becomes genuinely expensive rather than merely non-compliant. A Section 21 notice can be invalidated where the gas safety record was not given to the tenant, and a failure to serve it before the tenant moved in has in some cases been treated as incurable, meaning that tenancy can never be ended by that route. Deposit disputes go the same way. The fix is procedural and simple: serve the record before a new tenant takes occupation, give existing tenants a copy within 28 days of each check, and keep proof of both. We email the record straight to the tenant on request precisely so there is a timestamp on it.

Twelve months from the date of the inspection. There is a useful rule most landlords do not know about: you can have the check done up to two months before the expiry date without losing the time you have already paid for. The new certificate runs from the old expiry date rather than from the day of the inspection, so renewing early does not shorten your cycle. That is what makes it possible to batch a portfolio into one visit rather than chasing twelve separate dates across the year.

No. The legal duty falls on landlords, not owner-occupiers, so if you live in your own house nobody can require you to have one. Two situations make it worth having anyway. Selling is the first: you do not legally need a certificate to sell a house, but your buyer’s solicitor will very likely ask what evidence there is that the boiler and any gas fire are safe and were legally installed, and a current record plus the Building Regulations certificate answers that in one go. The second is a gas fire or back boiler you rarely use, where an annual check is the difference between a working flue and a carbon monoxide problem you cannot smell. Owner-occupiers pay the same £75.

If we carried out the check, ring us and we will email a duplicate the same day — we keep every record we issue. If another engineer did it, ask them first, because the regulations require them to hold a copy for at least two years. There is no central database of certificates you can look yourself up in, so where a copy genuinely cannot be recovered the answer is a fresh inspection: nobody can lawfully reissue a record for a check they did not perform.

The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 are enforced by the Health and Safety Executive and carry a fine of up to £6,000 per item of non-compliance, which is per appliance rather than per property. In the Crown Court the fine is unlimited, and prosecutions leading to imprisonment have followed serious cases. Beyond the fine, an uncertificated property will usually void your landlord insurance and undermines your ability to end the tenancy through Section 21. Very few landlords set out to skip a check; almost every lapse we are called about was a diary failure.

No. It must be a Gas Safe registered engineer, and their registration card must carry the specific appliance categories for what is being tested — a domestic boiler, a cooker and an LPG installation are all separate qualifications. A plumber without gas registration cannot legally work on gas at all. Ask to see the card, check the back of it for the categories, and check the registration number is genuine. Ours is 919881.

Yes. In a house in multiple occupation the duty covers the shared appliances as well as those in individual rooms, because an individual let room or bedsit is a tenancy in its own right. Bromley Council will ask to see a current gas safety record as part of an HMO licence application or renewal, alongside the electrical installation condition report and the fire alarm certification. We can schedule a whole HMO in a single visit rather than making the manager coordinate several.

Different jobs, and the single most common misunderstanding we hear. A safety check confirms the appliance is safe to use right now — combustion, flue, ventilation, safety devices. A service is maintenance: stripping and cleaning the burner, heat exchanger and condensate trap, checking the expansion vessel charge, and recording it in the Benchmark logbook so the manufacturer warranty stays valid. A boiler can pass a safety check and still be filthy and about to fail. Booking both together is £140.