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Paragraph 8.8 of Approved Document L Volume 1, the 2021 edition incorporating the 2023 amendments, ends with a single sentence that most homeowners never see: domestic central heating systems should be prepared and commissioned to BS 7593. Everything before that sentence — cleaning and flushing the circuits, dosing the primary circuit with an inhibitor, treating feed water in hard water areas — describes the state the system is supposed to be handed over in. Nothing in a boiler's instruction book keeps it there afterwards.

That standard, published in 2019, is titled a code of practice for the preparation, commissioning and maintenance of domestic central heating and cooling water systems. The maintenance half is the part that gets skipped. Inhibitor is consumed and diluted over time, particularly on a system that has been drained for a radiator change or that loses water through a weeping joint, so a system dosed correctly at installation is not necessarily protected five years later. Testing the inhibitor concentration and topping it up is a normal part of a competent service, and it costs a fraction of a heat exchanger.

Ask the engineer what they did on the water side, not just what they did to the boiler. A service record that reads only as a combustion printout has not covered the system that Approved Document L is talking about.

Gas Safe Register is the official gas registration body for the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey. It replaced CORGI in Great Britain and the Isle of Man on 1 April 2009 and in Northern Ireland and Guernsey on 1 April 2010, and it operates under different legislation in each place: the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 in Great Britain and the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2004 across the Irish Sea. Regulation 3 of the Great Britain regulations is the reason none of this is optional.

The card is the practical check and it takes ten seconds. The front carries the engineer's photograph, so you can confirm the person at your door is the person the card belongs to, and the name of the business, so you can confirm they are from the firm you rang. Licences are renewed every twelve months, so the expiry date matters as much as the name. The back lists what they are qualified to work on, and for a boiler service it should say so explicitly; a card that covers cookers does not cover your boiler.

Gas Safe Register's own advice is blunt about the alternative: if someone does not have a valid Gas Safe ID card, or refuses to show you one, do not let them carry out the work. You can also check the business on the register's public list rather than taking the card at face value.

Most appliance warranties are conditional on the appliance being serviced at the stated interval by a suitably qualified engineer, and on that being evidenced. The evidence is normally the service interval record in the paperwork supplied with the appliance, filled in and dated at each visit, together with the invoice. A warranty claim two years in is a paperwork exercise before it is a technical one, and a missing year is the usual reason a claim stalls.

Keep the service records with the original commissioning paperwork and the appliance instructions rather than in a drawer somewhere else. It is also what a buyer's surveyor asks for, and on a system that has had a heat exchanger or a pump replaced under warranty it is the only proof of what has already been done.

If you have skipped a year or inherited a house with no records at all, say so when you book. A first visit to an undocumented system is a longer job, because the engineer has to establish the inhibitor condition and the system layout from scratch instead of picking up where the last visit left off.

A service is priced on time and on what the visit is expected to find. The variables are the fuel and appliance type, whether the system is sealed or open-vented, how many radiators and zones there are, whether there is a cylinder and immersion to check, how accessible the boiler and the filter are, whether inhibitor testing and topping up is included or extra, and whether the quotation covers parts such as an oil nozzle or a filter cartridge. A first visit to a system with no history is longer than an annual return to one the engineer already knows.

LokalMatch is the introduction, not the engineer. Describe the system once with your postcode — fuel, appliance age if you know it, number of radiators, and anything that has been playing up — and heating engineers covering your area get in touch. Homeowners pay nothing to use LokalMatch; pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not carry out the work, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend anyone, so checking the Gas Safe card and asking what the service covers on the water side remains your job.