Mother and son left for a month without heating after 17 engineers failed to fix the boiler
A mother along with her 2 year old son were left with no hot water or heating for over a month. Emma Lewis’s boiler had failed on December 1st last year, and before it was fixed last Friday, she had 17 different engineers visit her home in Edinburgh House, in Broadfield, to try and resolve the issue, without seeing any result of success.
Emma and her son Riley were left unable to do anything over the festive period due to having to stay in and wait for the arrival of engineers. Despite December being a month of misery for many, financially, the company had initially only offered Emma a letter of apology along with a shopping voucher worth £20. Speaking before the problem was fixed, Emma, 23 had said, "We've been unable to do anything as we've been stuck in, waiting for people all the time. It is unsuitable for a little one.”
At Christmas they did take a rare break from waiting for engineers – with Emma deciding to sleep on her mum's sofa so her son could be in a warm house. “It would have been more than 17 people [who tried to fix the problem] but we weren't there for three days over Christmas," she then added, "We have no hot water so I can't bath my little one. I have to take him to his dad's."
On December 2, Emma had reported the problem to her housing association, Town & Country Housing Group, who then give her details of how to get in touch with Swale Heating. A spokesman for Town & Country said: "We would like to apologize to Miss Lewis for the recurring problems she has experienced with her boiler. We have replaced a range of parts over the last few weeks and on each occasion we have left the boiler operational, only for it to subsequently fail with a different fault. It is extremely rare for so many parts to fail within a single appliance.”
He then concluded, "The boiler is now working and we hope that there will be no more problems with it. Miss Lewis was provided with temporary heating throughout the period that these problems were occurring. She was originally offered £20 in vouchers as compensation but in view of the highly unusual circumstances with this boiler this has been increased to £100, which she has accepted."