How do I prepare a house for winter?

Almost every winter household emergency — burst pipes, boiler failure, damp, blocked drains — is predictable and largely preventable. This is the list, roughly in order of how much trouble skipping it causes.

What you'll need

• Ladder for gutters
• Pipe lagging
• Draught excluder strip
• Radiator bleed key (optional)

Step by step

1. Get the boiler serviced before the heating season, not during it.Engineers are booked solid the first cold week. A September service costs the same and is available.
2. Turn the heating on for an hour now and check every radiator heats evenly.Cold at the top means air — bleed it. Cold at the bottom means sludge, which is a different job.
3. Clear gutters, downpipes and gullies of leaves.Overflowing gutters in winter are a leading cause of penetrating damp.
4. Lag any exposed pipes in the loft, garage and outbuildings.Pipes in unheated spaces are the ones that freeze. Foam lagging is cheap and takes minutes.
5. Fit an outside tap cover and isolate the outside tap if you can.Outside taps and their pipework are the most common burst point.
6. Draught-proof doors, windows and the loft hatch.See the draught guide — leave deliberate ventilation alone.
7. Check loft insulation depth and top up thin areas.Current guidance is around 270mm of mineral wool. Many older lofts have well under half that.
8. Find and test the stopcock, and make sure everyone in the house knows where it is.This is the five minutes that limits a burst pipe to a puddle rather than a ceiling.
9. Check smoke and carbon monoxide alarms.Winter is when heating appliances run hardest and windows stay shut.

Tips

• If you're away in winter, leave the heating on a low frost-protection setting rather than off entirely, and consider turning the water off at the stopcock.
• Clear the drains and gullies as well as the gutters — leaves collect at ground level too.
• Move garden furniture, drain hoses and empty pots that can crack when the water in them freezes.
• Keep a torch, a spare radiator key and the number of a plumber somewhere you'd actually find them in the dark.

Common mistakes

• Booking the boiler service in December — Everyone else has the same idea at the same time, and it's the worst week to be without heating.
• Turning the heating off entirely when away — Frozen and burst pipes cost vastly more than a few weeks of frost-protection heating.
• Ignoring the gutters — Winter rain plus a blocked gutter is the classic route to penetrating damp.

Questions people ask