Handyman Services Are Not All Created Equally!

If you glanced at our website, www.silversaints.com, and then at our main competitors, 0800handyman. You'd be forgiven for thinking that both our services are very similar. In fact a friend of mine passed a comment recently that all handyman services are the same. Oh, but how wrong he was and I took it upon myself to convince him other wise.

Comparing Silver Saints to 0800handyman is like comparing a Nissan Micra to a Aston Martin DB9. Sure they are both cars and they'll both get you from A to B. But one of them offers just the basics with questionable efficiency while the other comes with style, class and performance. In this analogy, Silver Saints Handyman Service is the Aston Martin and 0800handyman is the Nissan. Now imagine that you could get the Aston Martin for the same price as the Nissan, which one would you choose?

My friend chuckled. But anybody with knowledge of both handyman services knows this to be true.

Good Neighbours

One of the jobs we are doing today has an interesting story behind it that I thought I would blog about.

We took a call last week from a gentleman who wanted to know what the cost and availability was for Silver Saints to supply and fit a replacement front door. He attached a photo of the current door and wanted a like for like replacement. After a bit of research we found the same door was available from Wicks in SW19. Having given him a fixed price for the supply, delivery and fitment of the new door. He agreed to go ahead with the work and asked us to contact someone else to gain access to the property as the person who lived at the address where the door was to be fitted was in hospital.

It turns out that the door had been kicked in by paramedics who needed to gain access to the property because the elderly gentleman that lived there had fallen ill and was unable to let them in.

The gentleman who had contacted us was one of his neighbours who had volunteered to arrange and pay for the replacement of the door and the person who was going to give us access to the property was yet another neighbour. They wanted to ensure that the property was secure and that the elderly resident would not have to worry about having the door replaced when he returned from hospital later in the week

Its good to know that people still go out of their way to help each other out and that a sense of community still exists within a very complex city like London.

My Day Out with the Ladder.

In case you don't know, all our handymen travel around London on either motorbikes or push bikes. One of the few drawbacks of these modes of transport is that we cannot carry step-ladders with us. This is not normally a problem as most customers have a step ladder or sturdy chair we can stand on if a bit of extra height is required.

This however was not the case for one of our customers who had just moved in to a flat in W2. Unfortunately she did not have a step ladder or much furniture yet and wanted us to install some curtain rails and replace a faulty lighting transformer.

So yesterday morning I set out from SW12 on my push bike with a trailer loaded with a 4 rung folding step ladder. Traveling through Clapham Common, over Chelsea bridge and across Hyde Park I arrived at the customers house at 9am as the Handyman Nick was just arriving.

I spent the day following Nick from job to job and even assisted in assembling some furniture at his last job of the day. After which I headed home, following the same route back through Hyde Park.

All in it was a 2 hour round trip and about 2000 calories of energy to get the ladder to W2. But I loved it.

Upgrading Electric Showers

Many Londoners have a love hate relationship with electric showers. Landlords and property developers love them, because the allow an additional shower at relatively low cost. While tenants hate them, because of their mediocre performance (especially in Winter).

Electric showers are fed cold water directly from the mains. The shower then 'instantaneously' heats the the incoming water to the desired temperature set by the user. In fact what is happening is the shower slows the flow of water down to give it enough time to heat the cold water. That is why in winter, when the incoming mains water is very cold, all you get is a trickle from the shower head.

The more powerful the rating of the shower (7.5Kw, 8.5 Kw, 9.5Kw or 10.5 Kw) the quicker it can heat up the water and the less it has to slow the flow down.

A lot of people have picked up on this fact and have opted to upgrade their poorly performing 7.5KW showers with a more powerful 10.5KW shower. Unfortunately, DIYers don't always understand the electrical implications of changing the rating of an electrical appliance to the rest of their wiring and protective devices (fuses, miniature circuit breakers). Simply, the amount of current that a cable can carry without overheating is limited mainly by the cross sectional area of the cable. Fuses and MCB are in place to protect the cable from overheating and therefore are rated to blow or trip before the electrical current gets to the cables failure current.

A 7,5 KW shower will draw a maximum current of 30Amps - 32 Amps. An installer would thus get away with a using a 32amp MCB and a 6 mm2 cable. A 10.5Kw shower would draw a maximum of 40-43 Amps and therefore would require a cable thickness of at least 10 mm2 which should be protected by a 45amp MCB. So if a person wishes to install a 10.5KW shower in place of a 7.5KW shower they should be confident that the electrical supply is capable of coping with such a change.

With a bit of domestic electrical knowledge and plumbing knowledge, upgrading an electric shower is a straight forward job. But without knowing what one is doing it can lead to a dangerous situation, mainly a fire risk.

So my advice is if you are adamant on doing the work yourself, get a competent person to check your electrics for you. Otherwise hire a professional handyman to do the whole install for you.