Book a Plumber: Slots, Attendance Windows and What We Need to Know

What do we need to know to book you in?

Four facts get an engineer to you with the right parts: the postcode, what the fault is doing now, which fitting or appliance it involves, and whether water is currently escaping. A live leak is treated as an emergency and jumps the queue. Everything else takes the next available window.

• The postcode. It settles the borough, the travel time and the water supply zone in one value.
• What the fault is doing now. A cistern refilling every twenty minutes and a cistern overflowing into the street are different jobs with the same description.
• Which fitting or appliance. A basin mixer, a thermostatic shower valve and a garden tap take three different cartridges, and the van carries all three only when it knows which one it needs.
• Whether water is escaping. This is the single value that decides emergency against appointment.

A photograph attached to the booking form does the work of a paragraph, faster. The make on the tap body, the model plate on a cylinder or the pattern of a valve handle each identify a part that would otherwise be identified on the day, in the property, with the water off.

When can an engineer come?

The line answers 24 hours a day, and non-urgent work is booked into morning or afternoon windows. Emergencies are attended at any hour. The window is confirmed at the point of booking, not estimated afterwards, and it is sent in writing with the engineer’s name.

A window is a range with a start and an end, and it is chosen against the engineer’s route rather than against a diary grid. Two things change it after booking, and both are told to you before they happen: a job ahead running longer than quoted, and an emergency that has to be attended first. A message goes out when the engineer sets off, which is the point at which the window becomes an arrival time.

Access at the property is the other half of the window. A tenant who has to be there, a concierge who holds the key, a parking bay that needs a permit — each is arranged at the point of booking, because each of them turns a one-hour job into a two-hour one when it is discovered at the door.

What happens after you book?

Four things follow a booking: a written confirmation naming the engineer, the window and the charge; a message when the engineer sets off; attendance inside the window; and an invoice matching the figure agreed. A change to any of the four is told to you before it happens.

1. A written confirmation arrives, carrying the engineer’s name, the arrival window and the quotation.
2. A message goes out when the engineer leaves the previous job.
3. The engineer attends inside the window, works to the quoted figure, and re-quotes in writing before touching anything outside it.
4. An invoice follows, matching the accepted quotation line for line, with the written workmanship guarantee issued alongside it.

Nothing on that list depends on the customer chasing it. A quotation that has to change because the fault is a different fault is put in writing and agreed before the work continues, and the figure already accepted stands for the work already agreed.

What will it cost?

A booking is priced as one fixed quotation covering travel, diagnosis, labour and the parts named on it. Out-of-hours attendance is quoted at its own rate. The total is agreed before an engineer travels, and that figure is what is invoiced. Declining it costs nothing.

⚠ No figure appears on this page. Rillwater has invoiced no job yet, and this is the page a customer reads at the moment of deciding — the worst possible place for a number taken from somebody else’s price list. The quotation is given on the call, in full, and it is the whole price for the job described.

Two things on your side make the visit shorter, and one of them can stop the damage before we arrive. Both take a minute and neither needs a tool.

What should you do before the engineer arrives?

Close the internal stopcock if water is escaping, clear access to the fitting, move anything valuable out of the working area, and have the parking arrangement ready. The stopcock is under the kitchen sink in most London homes and turns clockwise to shut.

1. Close the internal stopcock where water is escaping, and open the cold taps to drain the pipework it feeds.
2. Empty the cupboard under the sink, the airing cupboard or the boxing around the fitting, so the first fifteen minutes are not spent moving cleaning products.
3. Move anything absorbent or valuable out of the working area, and photograph anything already damaged before it is moved.
4. Confirm the parking arrangement — a permit, a bay suspension, or a visitor space — because a van circling for twenty minutes is twenty minutes of the window.

The internal stopcock is the valve isolating the whole property’s cold supply. Closing it stops water arriving and does not empty a pipe already full, which is why the cold taps are opened afterwards rather than instead.

Which boroughs can you book?

Sixteen London boroughs: Barnet, Bromley, Camden, Croydon, Ealing, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth and Westminster. A postcode outside those sixteen is told so at the point of booking, not after.

The list is closed and it is checked against the postcode before a window is offered. Rillwater works out of 32 Northampton Square, London EC1V 0ES, in the London Borough of Islington, and the engineers travel outward from there to the other fifteen. An address beyond the boundary is declined on the call, which costs the caller a minute rather than a wasted afternoon.

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