Featured Image: Aaron Services Gas fitter Jack Powles who fitted a replacement boiler EcoTEC sustain
Above:EcoTEC Vaillant boiler that Jack and the Aaron team fitted in my maisonette before Christmas. Jack has gone from learning with his dad (who also works at Aaron) from the age of fourteen, to apprentice to his dad then working as he is now: a skilled fitter. The boiler he fitted before Christmas was built in Vaillant’s Derbyshire plant. The new site is due to open later this year creating 200 new jobs.
This is great news: new local jobs with new manufacturing methods.
For me as a social housing householder, not realising that every time it’s rained over the last year that my boiler was flooded by water that backed up from a blocked gutter I needed to learn that and appreciate how I could understand better how my maisonette works, how MTVH (Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing) Services work. And they were great!
We all live in a local community where often knowledge, understanding, skills, learning have been translated into tech platforms where people respond in call centres but they don’t often get quality feedback on their work or the work they send out. I think because of this over time they can lose their enthusiasm and motivation because it’s not connected to a certainty that what they’ve done is appreciated and valued. We all need to be part of processes that we feel are improving.
Many householders in social housing have experienced precarious jobs and housing where they’ve moved and moved. Because we’ve over privileged the profit around tech, the profit around precarious jobs and housing over people’s wellbeing, health and capacity to contribute, so often when people move into social housing which is economically sheltered, there are basic things that householders don’t know that they need to know. Often householders have got into the habit of thinking that we’re machines, either smart machines or less smart machines and because we’re machines we just do things until we fall over and break down.
We’re beginning to think that we need to value skills, experience, effort, originality, experience, thought and reflection. So in this blog I’m going to talk about how impressed I am with a service I received from MTVH through their contractor Aaron Services (now Sureserve). My boiler had a yearly service, it had what we thought was a leak, it was repaired but the leak was coming from a blocked drain pipe that noone realised was the problem until the boiler was flooded with the overflow from the blocked drainpipe and had to be decommissioned. This happened over a long period of time and you can understand why and how social housing householders might not realise in the way that long standing homeowners might know how these things are interrelated. When you live in rented or social housing you often haven’t had experience of being responsible for these repairs, schools don’t teach DIY or house maintenance and the colleges are circled by private course providers who see anything to do with skills as a profit centre.
The Aaron surveyor, Paul, came to review the job, the boiler was decommissioned and two fan heaters were left for the few days before the appointment to remove the old boiler Greenstar 24i
Above: Jack with the decommisioned Greenstar boiler.
A few days before MTVH cleared and repaired the drainpipe which meant that everything was ready for Aaron Services to install the new boiler which would have an inside condenser and thermostat at the top of the stairs.
Below: the cleared wall where new piping and a condenser would be fitted with the new boiler, Jack preparing the boiler for the electrician, Jay, to test below him, Codie who fitted and tested the thermostat at the top of the stairs. What a great job they did: while they were working I made some Christmas cards and gave them one to thank them for a brilliant job.
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