This month’s column covers the Coronavirus pandemic and what it means for us as installers.

I’m not going to go down the road of getting involved politically, as that’s for others to argue. I just want to go over how it’s affected the heating industry over the course of the last three months or so.

At the start of this, I wrote an online article for Installer and I quote myself here: “Our government has just shut down all of our schools, and I have no doubt there will be more measures yet to come”.

Well didn’t those measures come fast? Two days later the country was officially in a state of lockdown. ‘Stay Safe’ became the new ‘Goodbye’, and Zoom rapidly became the new pub.

Work just stopped. Apart from absolute emergencies, the phone stopped ringing. I know mine did along with many others’.

Thankfully however, the official government guidance did state that as heating engineers, we were still able to actually go to work. But finding work was another thing altogether.

Most customers were wary of letting anyone into their property unless it was a real proper emergency.

I found as most plumbing merchants moved to very restrictive opening hours and collection of pre-ordered items only, it soon became the new norm to have to really plan ahead. And I quite liked working that way for a while, although not being able to go in and grab a coffee and a chat was probably what I missed the most.

As we’re now getting into the phase of slowly getting back to some sort of normality, the return to work for us installers is continuing. The merchant branches are open fully and we can go inside, albeit protected from each other by a perspex screen with a little hole at the bottom.

Work will come back; it has to. People still need heating and hot water and everything that goes with that. It may still take a while, but as soon as the cold weather hits, the work will come along.

I suppose one thing we as an industry can take from this, is that we are all very lucky in that we are an essential service and will always be required, even in a global pandemic.

The new normal will eventually become… just the old normal again.

More next month, until then: Stay Safe!