WTS Plumbing & Heating Ltd specify and install commercial boiler plant across Cheam, from a cascade set squeezed into the back of a shop on The Broadway to a plant room behind a trade counter on Kimpton Park Way. Our head office is at Jayes Park Courtyard in Ockley, so Cheam is well within our regular Surrey round, and a surveyor can usually visit within a few working days. We are Gas Safe registered heating engineers, and installation work carries a 12-month warranty on parts and workmanship.
In a Broadway parade unit the only route to the plant runs through the trading floor, and the only flue route may be an existing chimney, so the survey decides the scheme before a boiler is chosen. Before anything is ordered we check the incoming gas supply and metering capacity, the flue route, the space to get plant through the building, and whether the existing pipework, pumps and pressurisation can carry a modern condensing system at the temperatures it needs. A commercial installation is never a like for like swap here, because the village core is a conservation area and many buildings have flats or offices directly above the plant.
Three different Cheams, three different boiler jobs
Cheam Village is the awkward one. The crossroads where The Broadway, High Street, Station Way and Ewell Road meet has been a conservation area since 1970, and Sutton adopted a character appraisal and management plan for it in 2021. The parades are inter-war: mock Tudor with timber detailing and leaded lights, a few good 1930s Art Deco blocks, two and three storeys, retail at ground level with flats, offices and treatment rooms above. There is no plant deck and no goods lift. Boilers, cylinders and calorifiers go into back of house cupboards, cellars and roof voids, and they go in through the trading floor by hand.
North Cheam behaves differently. The A24 London Road through the North Cheam parade is a TfL red route with marked parking and loading bays rather than open kerbside, so landing a boiler, a plant skid or a large calorifier there has to be arranged before the delivery is booked, not on the morning. The buildings add their own difficulty. Nonsuch House puts around 6,100 sq ft of first and second floor offices directly over a working retail parade, with its own street entrance, and that split demise pattern is common along the parade: landlord plant and tenant plant in one building, and isolation that has to serve one demise only.
Behind North Cheam, on the Sutton edge of SM3, the Kimpton industrial area is the straightforward end of the patch. Kimpton Park Way, Minden Road, Sandiford Road and Wealdstone Road hold single storey steel portal frame warehousing with first floor trade offices, the sort of stock that typically runs gas fired warm air or radiant heating, and yards with hardstanding you can crane from. The limit there is trading hours, not access. The institutional load is heavier again: Cheam High School runs over 2,000 pupils and a large sixth form, and Cheam Leisure Centre on Malden Road carries a 30 metre pool, a health suite with sauna and steam, and a gym over three levels.
What this covers in Cheam
Survey, load assessment and plant sizing
We start with the load the building actually has, not the boiler being taken out. Older Cheam plant is usually oversized, picked for a building with different glazing, different occupancy and no controls worth the name. We measure real heating and hot water demand, check the emitters and the water volume, and size to it. In a Broadway unit with retail below and offices above, the measured load often lands under the plant coming out, which is why the old set short cycled all summer.
Cascade sets and plant room layout
Two or three modules in cascade nearly always beat one large boiler in a Cheam parade building. They follow the load down to low summer demand without short cycling, they leave you running if a module faults, and each unit can be carried up a narrow inter-war staircase. Layout matters as much as the kit in a cupboard or cellar position, so we set out withdrawal clearances, combustion and ventilation air, a condensate route to a drain, and gas detection where it is called for.
Flue routing, terminals and dilution
The flue decides more schemes in Cheam than the boiler does. On a conservation area frontage a visible terminal on the front elevation is a planning conversation before it is an engineering one, so we look first at existing chimneys, redundant ducts and internal risers to a discreet roof position. Where a vertical run genuinely is not available, a fan diluted system at low level is the alternative we design and price against.
Gas supply, metering capacity and pipework sizing
A bigger boiler set needs gas to reach it at the right pressure, and in an inter-war parade the existing service and metering arrangement is often the real constraint. We calculate the load, size the run for pressure drop over its full length, and tell you early if the supply or the metering point has to be upgraded through your gas supplier and transporter, because that has a lead time you need in the programme.
Circuits, pumps, pressurisation and water quality
New plant on tired pipework fails quickly. Broadway circuits were laid out for 82/71, so a condensing cascade cannot get its return temperature down through them unresized, and old steel samples come back loaded with black iron oxide. On Kimpton Park Way the emitters are warm air or radiant rather than a wet circuit, which changes the answer again. Split demise buildings need the fill point and pressurisation serving one demise only. Flushing, dosing and a water sample record are included.
Controls, BMS interface and commissioning
A parade building runs a shop six days with flats above on a different pattern, so a single time clock heats an empty demise to warm the other. We set up sequence control, weather compensation, optimum start and time zoning to match how each part is occupied, whether that is a term calendar at Cheam High School or a pool plant schedule at the leisure centre. Where there is a BMS we agree the points list, then commission, log results and show the site team.
Consents, notification and the paperwork you are left with
Anything that changes the outside of a building in the Cheam Village conservation area, a new flue terminal on a front elevation, a louvre, plant on a visible wall, needs checking with London Borough of Sutton before it is designed in. Listed stock in the catchment needs listed building consent, and which council you apply to depends on which side of the boundary the building sits. Ye Olde Red Lion on Park Road runs through London Borough of Sutton. Nonsuch Mansion sits in Nonsuch Park on the Epsom and Ewell side, so consent there runs through Epsom and Ewell Borough Council. Building control is notified either to Sutton or to a registered building control approver. You are handed commissioning sheets, gas certification, as fitted drawings and operating and maintenance information at handover.
Keeping the building open while the plant changes over
Most Cheam installations are phased around trading rather than around us. Village retail and food units take early starts, evenings or Sundays, because the only route to the plant is through the shop. Care homes on Downs Side, Park Road, York Road and Shirley Avenue are mostly domestic-scale buildings doing commercial duties, and they cannot lose heating or hot water overnight, so we run temporary boilers and change over in stages. Schools and the leisure centre are holiday and shutdown work with a fixed handback date written into the programme. On the borough roads Sutton currently charge £40 per bay per day for a suspension, or £30 per 100 metres of unrestricted highway per day, and ask for at least seven working days' notice on 020 8770 4161. On the A24 it is TfL, and a different process.
Typical commercial buildings in Cheam
- Village parade retail, cafes and treatment rooms
- Offices over shops and split demise buildings
- Trade counter and warehouse units on the Kimpton estate
- Schools, academies and sixth forms
- GP surgeries and healthcare buildings
- Care homes and supported living buildings
- Leisure centres, pool halls and gyms
- Pubs, restaurants and event venues
- Landlords and managing agents of multi-let estates
Duties and standards that apply
- Work on gas plant in commercial premises must be carried out by a Gas Safe registered business under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, and WTS is Gas Safe registered. Some industrial premises fall outside those Regulations, but the duty to use competent people still applies under health and safety law, and we work to the same standard either way. Installations in industrial and commercial premises are normally worked to the IGEM UP series, and gas fired hot water boilers of roughly 70kW to 1.8MW net input are covered by BS 6644. Those are industry standards used to show the duties in the regulations have been met, not separate pieces of law.
- New or replacement boiler plant is building work under the Building Regulations 2010. Part L deals with the efficiency and control of building services, and Part J with combustion appliances and flues, though the Approved Document J guidance stops at 70kW net input for gas, so larger commercial plant is designed to BS 6644 and IGEM/UP/10 instead. Approved Document L Volume 2, buildings other than dwellings, is the supporting guidance rather than the law itself. The work is notified to London Borough of Sutton building control or to a registered building control approver, and commissioning results form part of that record.
- External changes in the Cheam Village conservation area are a planning matter, so flue and plant positions should be put to London Borough of Sutton before they are fixed. Listed buildings need listed building consent from whichever council the building sits in, which is Sutton for Ye Olde Red Lion on Park Road and Epsom and Ewell Borough Council for Nonsuch Mansion, with Historic England consulted on the higher grades. We do not assume permitted development for external plant on a commercial building here.
- Replacing plant in an occupied building is construction work, so the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 apply and the client carries duties of their own. Those duties bite hardest on the Cheam care homes, where residents stay in the building throughout and the programme has to allow for a staged changeover. Where the scheme includes stored hot water, as it does in those buildings and at the leisure centre, we design out dead legs, select the calorifier or cylinder for the duty, and set and record temperatures at handover, so the legionella risk assessment you keep under the HSE approved code of practice L8 and guidance HSG274 is straightforward to write.
Common questions
In most cases you lose one trading day rather than a week, and sometimes none at all. The strip out and the new plant go in outside your trading hours, so most of the disruption falls in hours you were shut anyway. The day you are most likely to lose is the gas and flue connection, when the meter is off and the shop cannot open. With no rear access we bring plant in through the front in sections and sheet the trading floor each night, and a temporary electric heat and hot water arrangement covers the counter and the staff facilities until the new plant is live.
By designing the demises apart at the survey stage, which is the issue that decides most schemes in buildings like Nonsuch House. We trace what the existing system actually serves, which is rarely what the lease plan says, then set the new plant up so each demise has its own isolation, its own controls and its own means of recording use. Where a riser has to cross ownerships, that route is agreed in writing before the work starts.
Quite possibly, so treat it as a programme item rather than a formality. The application goes to London Borough of Sutton, and on a front elevation a paid pre-application enquiry is usually worth it, because it tells you whether a terminal will be resisted before you pay for a design around it. The statutory target for a minor application is eight weeks, so allow a couple of months from submission, and longer where the building is listed and a heritage statement is wanted. What carries an application is evidence: elevation drawings showing the terminal in position, the manufacturer's terminal detail, and a short note on why an internal or rear route was ruled out.
Yes, and it is a short sequence of checks rather than a guess. We read the meter badge for its rated capacity, run a tightness and working pressure test at the meter outlet with the existing plant at full rate, then measure the pressure drop along the run to the appliance to see what it is really delivering. If the meter or the service has to be uprated, that is an application to your gas supplier followed by a quotation and connection date from the transporter, and on a commercial connection that can take months rather than weeks. It is the item most likely to move your start date, so we raise it at survey.
Yes, and the way to protect the date is to programme backwards from it. For a handback at the end of August, survey and design want to be finished by around February, boilers, flue components and any gas supply uprate ordered by April so nothing long lead sits on the critical path, and any planning or listed building consent submitted at the same time. Site starts the day the building closes in July. Commissioning, water treatment and the controls demonstration sit inside that programme rather than after it, so the building comes back with the paperwork complete.
Talk to us about Cheam
If you are budgeting for a boiler replacement in Cheam, or a scheme has already been specified and you want a second view on the flue route, the gas capacity or the phasing, we are happy to walk the plant room with you. WTS work across Cheam, North Cheam and the Kimpton estate from our head office at Jayes Park Courtyard in Ockley, covering shops and offices, schools, surgeries, care homes and industrial units. Call the Surrey office on 01306 621 057 or email info@wtsmechanical.co.uk and we will arrange a survey.
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