Replacing Spiral Sash Balances

We attended a job in Islington last week to measure up for replacement spiral balances on four double glazed aluminium windows. The tenant told us that we where the sixth company to take measurements. For some reason all the other tradesmen had turned the job down.

We returned to the property yesterday, armed with 8 pairs of replacement balances and had them all fitted in four hours. The job did need two handymen, due to the shear weight of the windows, but the job could not have gone smoother.

In the end we left a very happy landlord and a relieved flat of tenants who had been complaining about the windows not working since the summer.

It felt good to succeed where five others had failed to even try......now that's Silver Service.

Really Really Old Sash Windows

One of the most requested jobs Silver Saints Handyman Service undertakes is the repair of broken sash window cords and spiral sash balances. But our London handy men also get requests to repair sash windows that just aren't in balance and won't stay open. I'm sure we've all experienced the problem, you open a sash window and as soon as you let go of it, it slides closed.

The reason is that the counter weights on either side of the window are not heavy enough to keep the window up. The answer is to add an extra lead weight, called a make weight, to the current window weights.

Our handy man Don, undertook just this job for a media company in Covent Garden last week. The interesting part of this job was that they had a dozen windows which seemed to be over a hundred years old, which still had the original Victorian 2mm thick glass in them. As a result Don had to be extremely careful in the way he handled the windows.

It was amazing to see young creatives sitting at ikea desks with multiple flat screens using the latest the Apple software to edit films and documentaries while starring out a window that is 150 years old.