Asbestos Water Tank Removal in Guildford

An asbestos cement cold water tank in the loft is one of those things nobody thinks about until a heating engineer sticks his head through the hatch and says something.

They were standard from the 1950s to the mid 1980s in houses with a gravity-fed system: a large storage tank in the roof space feeding the hot water cylinder and the taps. Plastic replaced them once moulded tanks became cheap, so anything still in place is likely to be original.

Recognising one

Thickness is the giveaway. Asbestos cement tanks have walls around a centimetre thick and they are heavy even empty. The surface is a rough, chalky grey, often with a scale line where the water has sat for decades, and the top edge is frequently rolled or thickened.

Compare that with the alternatives. A plastic tank is thin and gives when you press it. A galvanised steel tank is rigid but thin-walled, with riveted or folded seams and rust at the waterline.

The other clue is what is attached. These tanks are usually fed by a brass ball valve of the same era, sit on timber bearers across the joists, and have a wooden or asbestos board lid that has warped.

Why they usually come out with something else

Very few people remove a water tank as a standalone job, and there is a good reason for that.

A gravity system with a loft tank is being replaced by a combination boiler or an unvented cylinder in most cases, which makes the tank redundant. That is when it gets noticed and that is when it should go: the plumber wants it out, the system is being drained anyway, and the loft is already being worked in.

The other common trigger is a loft conversion or a loft boarding job. Somebody is about to be moving around up there with materials, and a brittle tank on bearers is exactly the thing a foot goes through.

Doing it alongside other work is also cheaper. A large part of the cost of a small job is the visit, so combining it with pipe lagging or an old flue at the same address makes far more sense than three separate mornings.

What happens on the day

The tank is drained first, which sounds obvious and is worth stating because a full tank cannot be moved safely and dragging a part-full one is how they crack.

The loft is prepared. Sheeting goes down along the route from the tank to the hatch, the hatch surround is protected, and where the loft is unboarded a working platform goes across the joists. Nobody works off joists alone next to a brittle object.

Fittings are disconnected and the tank is lifted clear of its bearers whole. It gets wrapped in situ rather than after it is moved, because the moment of most risk is the carry, not the lift.

Where the tank will not pass through the hatch it is cut down, wet, with hand tools rather than anything powered. A disc cutter on asbestos cement in a confined roof space is about the worst combination available.

Then out through the house, down the stairs, into the vehicle, and away on a registered carrier to a permitted site. You get the hazardous waste consignment note.

The bearers, the lid if it is timber, and the old ball valve go out as ordinary waste. If the lid turns out to be asbestos board rather than timber, which happens, it goes with the tank.

What replaces it

Usually nothing, because the whole point of the exercise is that the system no longer needs storage in the roof.

Where a gravity system is being kept, a modern plastic tank of the same capacity drops onto the same bearers. Those are light enough that the constraint stops being the hatch and starts being whether you can get the lid on.

The one thing worth doing while the space is open is looking at the insulation around the pipework that fed the tank. Old pipe insulation is a different material with a different legal status, and finding it while the loft is already accessible saves a second visit.

Around Guildford

Loft tanks track the age of the heating system rather than the age of the house, which makes them slightly unpredictable.

The 1930s to 1970s stock at Burpham, Merrow, Onslow Village and Westborough is where most survive, particularly in houses that have had the same boiler since the 1980s. The post-war housing at Park Barn, Bellfields and Stoughton is similar, and blocks of flats from that period often had a communal arrangement with tanks in a shared roof space, which is a different job again and one with a Regulation 4 duty attached for whoever manages the building.

Houses that have already been converted to a combination boiler generally had the tank taken out at the time, so a period property is not automatically a candidate. It depends what has been done to the heating since.

We cover Guildford and the towns around it. The areas we cover page lists them.