Servicing TMVs in London hotels and serviced apartments without upsetting guests

December in a London hotel means Christmas parties, theatre breaks, shoppers with too many bags and a lobby tree that took three people to put up. It's not the month anyone wants an engineer wandering the corridors with a toolbag. But a guest's shower going scalding hot or stone cold is worse for business than a well-planned service, so let's talk about how to do it quietly.

Where the TMVs are in a hotel

Hotels and serviced apartments have more thermostatic valves than people tend to think:

• Guest showers. Most hotel showers have a thermostatic mixer, either a bar valve on the wall or a concealed valve behind the tiles. They do the same job as a separate TMV and need the same checks.
• Baths. Rooms with baths often have a TMV on the bath fill, particularly in newer or refurbished buildings where Part G applies.
• Accessible rooms. These may have valves on basins as well, and guests who are more vulnerable to scalding.
• Back of house. Staff changing rooms, showers, accessible toilets, the spa or gym if there is one.
• Serviced apartments are a mix of all the above, plus kitchen taps that are usually left unmixed.

The awkward thing is that a hotel refurbished floor by floor over twenty years can have a different make of valve on every level. That's normal. It just means the first visit needs to work out what's where, ideally into an asset register.

Fitting servicing around guests

A shower valve service usually takes well under an hour per room, but the room has to be empty and the water off while we do it. So the trick is choosing the right rooms at the right time. The approaches that tend to work best:

1. Work with housekeeping. We follow the cleaners. Once a room's checked out and before it's made up, we service the valves, and housekeeping finishes behind us. The room goes back on sale the same day.
2. Use the quieter spells. For a lot of central London hotels, early January and some weekdays outside school holidays are calmer than December. If you can block out a floor for a day, it's much quicker than picking off single rooms.
3. Start early, finish tidy. Back-of-house areas can be done before the morning rush. Corridor noise is kept down, and nobody leaves kit lying about.
4. Keep front of house in the loop. A simple room list for the day means reception knows which rooms are out and when they're back.

The quiet room problem

Hotels have a Legionella risk that homes mostly don't: rooms that sit empty. A room that isn't let for a week, or a floor closed for refurbishment, means water standing in the pipework and in the warm mixed section after each valve. Showers are the outlet that matters most here, because they make a fine spray that people breathe in.

HSG274 Part 2 expects little-used outlets to be flushed regularly and showerheads and hoses to be cleaned, descaled and disinfected periodically. Your Legionella risk assessment and written scheme will set the detail for your building. In practice, a lot of hotels build flushing into housekeeping routines, with a record kept for each unlet room. TMV servicing fits alongside that, it doesn't replace it.

Winter, cold water and complaints

There's a seasonal twist too. In winter, London's cold mains water drops a long way in temperature, so thermostatic valves have to draw more hot water to hold their set point. If the hot supply to the upper floors is marginal, guests start to notice. We've covered this in more detail in winter cold water and your TMVs, but the short version is: don't wind the valves up to compensate, find out why the hot supply is struggling.

Hard water doesn't help either. Shower valves in busy rooms run for hours a day, and London's water leaves scale everywhere it goes. If you want to know what that does to a valve, see hard London water and TMV limescale.

A typical scenario

Imagine a 120-room hotel in the West End with thermostatic showers in every room, baths in the suites and a basement gym. The general manager doesn't want rooms off sale in December, but the chief engineer wants the valves done before the New Year. One way to handle it would be to service back of house and the gym before Christmas, then take two or three floors a day in the first fortnight of January, working behind housekeeping on checkout rooms. Each room is back in service the same afternoon, and the hotel ends up with a register showing every valve, its make, its reading and its next due date.

Getting in and out of a London hotel

Hotels in Central London and the Docklands end of East London rarely have parking for contractors. We'll ask about service entrances, goods lifts, loading bays and sign-in before the day, and come with the kit to carry in one go. Our how we work page has more on how we handle access in busy buildings.

The short version

Hotels can't close, so plan TMV servicing around housekeeping and the quieter weeks. Record real temperatures, keep on top of empty rooms and shower hygiene, and get a proper register so you know what's behind every tiled wall. Your guests will never know we were there, which is exactly the point.

See TMV servicing for what each visit includes, or installation and replacement if your shower valves are past saving.