Sometimes you end up responsible for a house with no paperwork at all. An inherited property, a probate sale, or a purchase where the previous owner handed over keys and nothing else.
You are not starting from nothing. The house itself carries most of the information, and an afternoon with a torch and a phone camera recovers a surprising amount of it.
The walk round
Photograph every plate you find. Transcribing model numbers by hand in bad light produces errors.
6 things to do
Ticks are for this visit only. Nothing here is saved anywhere.
Manufacture dates tell you most of what you need
Nearly every major appliance encodes its manufacture date somewhere on the plate, sometimes in the serial number itself. A quick search for the model plus how to read the serial usually decodes it.
That gives you the one thing that matters most: how far through its life something is. A fifteen year old water heater is a different planning problem from a three year old one, regardless of whether either is misbehaving today.
Typical service lives
Rough figures for planning, not predictions. Maintenance affects these considerably.
Boiler or furnace
- Typical life
- 15 to 20 years
- What to do if yours is near it
- Get it serviced and ask directly about remaining life
Water heater
- Typical life
- 8 to 12 years
- What to do if yours is near it
- Budget for replacement rather than waiting for the failure
Air conditioning
- Typical life
- 10 to 15 years
- What to do if yours is near it
- Service before summer, ask about refrigerant type
Roof covering
- Typical life
- 20 to 30 years
- What to do if yours is near it
- Get an inspection rather than guessing from the ground
Consumer unit or panel
- Typical life
- 25 to 40 years
- What to do if yours is near it
- Have it inspected, particularly if it looks original
| System | Typical life | What to do if yours is near it |
|---|---|---|
| Boiler or furnace | 15 to 20 years | Get it serviced and ask directly about remaining life |
| Water heater | 8 to 12 years | Budget for replacement rather than waiting for the failure |
| Air conditioning | 10 to 15 years | Service before summer, ask about refrigerant type |
| Roof covering | 20 to 30 years | Get an inspection rather than guessing from the ground |
| Consumer unit or panel | 25 to 40 years | Have it inspected, particularly if it looks original |
Book one inspection rather than five
If the house is genuinely undocumented, a single competent visit from a heating engineer or a general surveyor gives you more than weeks of guessing, and it produces a written record you now own.
The value is not only the findings. It is that you now have a dated starting point, which is what every future service interval will be measured from.
Treat unknowns as due
Where you genuinely cannot find out when something was last done, assume it is due. For most of the maintenance list an unnecessary check costs an hour and a missed one costs a great deal more.
Once you have done it, you have a date, and the guessing stops permanently. The intervals to work from are in how often things actually need servicing.