About this site

Asked in Ayrshire answers the questions people in Ayrshire's farmhouses, cottages, steadings and coast towns ask about their water, heating and drains, one question to a page.

What this site is

It is a publication: 38 common questions, each answered in plain words. The questions are the ones that come up again and again in houses with an oil tank in the garden, a spring or borehole instead of the mains, a septic tank in the field, or wind and salt coming off the Firth of Clyde. They are written as common questions, not as letters from real people, and nobody quoted on this site is invented.

It is not a plumber, heating engineer or installer. It takes no calls, books no work, gives no quotes and does no installs or repairs. It has no connection with any Ayrshire plumbing firm with a similar name, and it does not recommend local firms.

How the answers are written

Every answer is checked against official Scottish sources: the Scottish Government's building standards, SEPA, the Drinking Water Quality Regulator for Scotland, the Ayrshire councils, Home Energy Scotland, OFTEC, the Gas Safe Register, HSE and makers' own instructions. Each page lists the sources it was checked against and the date, and figures such as grant amounts carry the month they were checked. Nothing on the site comes from lab testing, site visits or customer stories, because there are none.

Where the law differs between Scotland and England, the answers follow Scotland's. Rules change, so check the linked source before you rely on a figure for a decision that costs money.

Safety, and where the answers stop

The pages say what a householder can safely look at and what to leave to a Gas Safe registered engineer, an OFTEC-registered technician, an electrician, the council, SEPA, Scottish Water or a licensed waste carrier. If you smell mains gas, don't touch switches or flames, open doors and windows, get out, and call the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999 from outside; for LPG, call the supplier's emergency number on the tank or bill, also from outside. If a carbon monoxide alarm sounds, get everyone out into fresh air before you call anyone.

Links to four businesses run by the same team

A few pages link to one of four US businesses as a reference model to compare a product type: PlumbingSupplyAndMore (a plumbing and heating supply house), SoftPro Water Systems and Quality Water Treatment (water-treatment stores) and Central Plumbing & HVAC (a heating and plumbing service company in Pennsylvania). All four are run by the same team as this site, and every link says so beside it. They are in the US, so nothing here promises delivery or service in Scotland. No link is paid for by anyone else.

The pictures

30 of the lead pictures are real photographs, mostly of Ayrshire houses and countryside, credited on the photo credits page. 17 show things no free photograph showed well, such as an oil leak by a tank or a UV unit on a supply; those are AI-generated pictures and their captions say so.