Why Annual Servicing Is the Revenue Stream Most Stove Installers Leave on the Table
Every stove you've installed is a customer due a sweep and a service on a predictable schedule, but most installers have no system for turning that into booked work. Here's what HETAS recommends and roughly what it's worth per customer per year.
If your books look like most solid fuel installers', September to February is chaos and March to August is quiet. New installs cluster around the start of the heating season, and the rest of the year you're chasing smaller jobs, hearth work, or waiting for the phone to ring. There's a way to smooth that out that doesn't involve chasing new customers at all: the ones you already installed for.
Every stove you fit is a customer who needs a chimney sweep and a service, on a schedule you can actually predict. Most installers know this in theory. Very few have a system that turns it into booked work.
What HETAS actually recommends, and why it matters for your pricing conversation
HETAS's guidance is specific enough to quote to a customer directly: chimneys burning wood should be swept at least twice a year, and once a year if the customer is burning smokeless fuel only. On top of that, HETAS recommends the appliance itself gets a full annual service, separate from (or combined with) the sweep, covering the door rope seals, air intake, glass, controls, and the CO alarm.
That's useful because it's not vague "get it serviced regularly" advice, it's a defined interval you can put in a quote or a job note: two sweeps a year for wood burners, one for smokeless, plus an annual service. When a customer asks "how often do I actually need to do this," you've got a straight answer that comes from the regulator, not a sales pitch.
The numbers, roughly
A standard sweep currently runs somewhere around £60 to £85 across most of the UK, with an average close to £72 and London running higher, closer to £82. A proper stove service, where someone strips the glass, checks the rope seals and controls, and inspects the installation, typically starts from around £75 and goes up from there depending on what's involved and how much flue needs accessing.
Put those together and a single domestic customer on a wood-burning stove is worth somewhere in the region of £150 to £250 a year in servicing and sweeping alone, before you've picked up any repair or parts work that turns up during the visit. Multiply that by however many stoves you've fitted over the last five years and you're looking at a second business sitting inside your existing customer list, doing nothing, because nobody's calling those customers to book them in.
Why installers leave this on the table
It's rarely a lack of demand. Customers generally want their stove serviced, especially once they've had a CO alarm chirp at 2am or read a headline about house fires. The gap is almost always operational: the reminder to call the customer back depends on someone remembering, and "someone remembering" doesn't survive a busy October.
The usual failure points look like this:
The customer's install date and appliance details live in an old quote email or a paper job sheet, not somewhere searchable six months later.
Nobody owns "who's due a sweep this quarter" as a job, so it only happens when a customer calls you first, at which point a competitor with a booking reminder already beat you to it.
Service and sweep get treated as a favour or an afterthought rather than a priced, standard offer with its own slot in the diary.
None of these are pricing problems. They're all the same problem wearing different outfits: nobody's tracking the customer relationship past the point the install invoice gets paid.
Turning it into an actual offer
The installers who do this well tend to do three things differently.
First, they price servicing as its own line item at the point of sale, not something they mumble about "coming back to sort out." A sentence in the handover pack along the lines of "we recommend a sweep before each heating season, and we'll be in touch to book that in" sets the expectation while the customer is still happy with the install.
Second, they time the reminder to land before the customer needs it, not after. HETAS's own advice is to sweep just before the heating season starts, so a reminder that goes out in August or early September, ahead of the rush, catches customers while they're thinking about getting the stove ready rather than after it's already smoking up the room.
Third, they keep the appliance and flue details from the original install (make and model, flue liner type, HETAS reference, install date) somewhere they can pull up in seconds when the customer calls back two years later with a vague question about "the thing you put in." Nothing kills a repeat booking faster than a ten-minute back-and-forth trying to work out what was actually fitted.
Where this fits with how you already run jobs
This is the part that's easy to get right if your job records are already organised, and genuinely hard if they're scattered across email, WhatsApp, and a notebook. In BurnerCRM you can automate annual service reminders after installation, once configured in your settings, we'll automatically email your customers a reminder every 12 months. Additionally, BurnerCRM keeps each installation's details (appliance, flue liner warranty, HETAS reference, install date, photos) attached to the customer record it came from, so when a service is due, the information you need to book it and quote it accurately is already there rather than something you have to go digging for.
We've built the features to make sure the job doesn't fall through the gap between "install complete" and "customer forgotten about," which is where most of this recurring revenue currently goes to die. If you're curious whether that fits how you already work, you can see how it's set up at burnercrm.co.uk.
Sources: HETAS – When should I get my chimney swept?, HETAS – How much does a chimney sweep cost?, HETAS – Servicing, Casa Stoves – Servicing & Maintenance FAQs