11 March 2026
Why heating jobs pile up in the second week of a cold snap
Housing officers hear the same sentence every January: the phones never stopped. The request log usually shows something quieter on day one of a freeze and something much louder seven to ten days later. Tenants try the boiler, wait, borrow a heater, then raise a job when the house has been cold through a weekend.
When we overlay daily minimum temperature for the local authority area against jobs coded as heating or boiler, the peak is rarely the coldest night. It sits after a run of nights below a threshold that each stock already ‘knows’ — older solid-wall blocks often move earlier than well-insulated new-build schemes in the same landlord’s list.
That lag matters for contractor capacity. If the diary is staffed for the weather forecast rather than for the delayed wave of tickets, Friday of week two looks like a failure of the helpdesk when it is a predictable bulge in the extract. A Repair Demand Review will usually carry one page that simply counts heating jobs by week against the previous two winters, without claiming the weather ‘caused’ every ticket.
Free-text notes muddy the picture. ‘No heat’ can mean a thermostat, a payment meter, or a genuine boiler fault. We do not recode those notes into a diagnosis. We keep the landlord’s own trade field and say, in the briefing, how many jobs sit in a mixed ‘heating’ bucket. Officers then decide whether a sample audit of notes is worth a separate piece of work.
If you only have completed-date and not raised-date, the cold-snap pattern flattens. Completion follows contractor availability, not tenant discomfort. Ask for both timestamps before anyone draws a winter chart for a board.