Repairs across Letchworth Garden City
A lot of work adapting to the small original kitchens of Arts and Crafts cottages, where under-counter appliance space is tight and freestanding machines are the norm.
Reached from the A1(M) at junction 9 on the A505, a quick run in, with the garden city's wide verged roads making on-street access unusually easy.
The housing in Letchworth Garden City — and what it does to appliances
The original garden city stock is Arts and Crafts — roughcast render, steep tiled roofs, casement windows and small original kitchens designed before domestic appliances existed. Later decades added inter-war and post-war housing, and the Jackmans estate brought a large body of 1970s development. Many of the early cottages have had rear extensions to create usable kitchens, but internal doorways and floor levels can still be restrictive.
Hard water in Letchworth Garden City
Very hard — Affinity Water supply from the North Hertfordshire chalk aquifer, generally in the order of 295 ppm calcium carbonate (roughly 21 Clark degrees). In practice that means limescale builds on every heating element in the house — the washing machine, the dishwasher, the kettle and the boiler. It's the reason element and pump failures are so much more common here than in soft-water parts of the country.
Descaling a washing machine and a dishwasher every eight to twelve weeks is the single most cost-effective thing a household in Letchworth Garden City can do for its appliances. Our hard water guide explains exactly how.
Getting to you, and getting to the machine
Letchworth is one of the easier towns to work in, because the Parker and Unwin layout gave the roads wide grass verges and generous setbacks, so parking near the door is rarely a problem and restrictions barely exist outside the town square. Original cottages, though, have narrow front doors, a step up from the path and sometimes an awkward turn from the hall into a low-ceilinged rear extension, and that turn rather than the road decides whether a machine comes out cleanly. Jackmans uses parking courts and rear pedestrian access instead of road frontage, so a house number and a short description help enormously.