Trade NamesOil and Gas Services Ltd has serviced the home heating sector and suffered from the vagaries of various oil crisis for near 40 years. Rose Doyle reports

The problems and undeniable traumas of house heating are perennial and certainly not new. They are changing however - and with more speed and efficiency over the last 40-odd years than ever in the history of home comforts before that.

Oil and Gas Services Ltd, who've been in the heating business since 1968, are better positioned than most to tell the story of the hot and the cold of it.

To begin in the middle there's a story from the winter of 1981 which spotlights the uniquely central role a heating company plays in our needy lives.

Gerry Griffin, the one-time accountant who set up the company in 1967 and who, though retired, is still its managing director, tells it like it was.

"The freezing winter of 1980-'81 was one of our most difficult periods," he says, memories of the event still hilariously clear and detailed. "On new year's eve the temperatures plummeted to between -8 and -12 and on new year's day the heating of huge numbers of people failed. We came in to work on January 2nd at 7 a.m., fully manned and ready, to find no heating in the offices, about 50 calls on the answering machine and more coming in.

"We were washed out with calls and, by 9 a.m., we'd swarms of people almost knocking the door down too. The problem lay with the effects of the freezing temperatures on the oil and I'd to demonstrate this to the droves of people, who were blaming us.

"I got on to RTÉ and they made an announcement explaining the blame lay with the oil and the Evening Press appeared with similar headlines and that saved our lives! Suddenly those who'd been blaming us and going beserk laid off. RTÉ sent round a crew and we demonstrated for them how boilers could be got up and going. That cold period lasted to the end of February. We were continually awash with calls but we survived!"

Gerry might be MD but the day-to-day running of the company is in the safe, second generation hands of his general manager son, Rowland Griffin. These days, too, Oil and Gas Services operate from relaxed offices attached to the granite-built, one-time Church and Quaker Meeting Hall on Gilford Road in Sandymount.

They moved there in 1971 from beginnings in much more crowded conditions. Gerry Griffin, helped along by the odd, good humoured interjection from Rowland, tells that bit of the story too.

"The beginning! Oh, god help us . . ." he laughs, then settles to the story. "The company was conceived in November 1967 and born on February 1st, 1968. I was the accountant with a company in Synge Street which serviced garage forecourt equipment all over the country. This meant we'd close links with the petrol companies, especially Esso.

"It was Esso which rang the company one day and asked if the company was interested in taking on the servicing of central heating boilers. They weren't but one of the directors and myself went to see Esso and it was agreed we'd set it up as a sideline of the main company.

"Oil Fired Services, as it was then, was up and running by February 1st with three Mini-vans and three heating engineers. It was a sideline which got bigger and bigger, faster and faster, and eventually ran out of space in Synge Street."

Central heating service engineers were a rare breed in the early 1960s, a time when houses were kept warm with the imaginative use of storage, mobile gas and solid fuel heaters, accompanied by the wearing of woolly vests. By the late 1960s, when Oil Fired Services began to take off, oil heating had begun to mushroom too.

"We thought, when we got the vans fitted out with shelves, that we were really ahead of the posse," Gerry remembers. "The opposition didn't have shelves! We'd a key tool too in the nozzle spanner. We thought we were the cat's pyjamas with two engineers for Dublin and the third in Cork."

The heating service business was very different then. "Customers' supply and service agreements entitled them to routine and unlimited breakdown calls. We worked 365 days of the year, seven days a week and had to guarantee to provide service within 24 hours of being called out. We operated like that for a large number of years. Boilers were installed in sheds and lean-tos, in all sorts of places. My own was in the kitchen and lasted 30 years!"

By July 1971 Oil Fired Services had moved to Sandymount and become a separate company owned and run by Gerry Griffin and other shareholders. "It was a very, very sensible move," Gerry remembers. "It gave us space, and parking - something which even then was difficult in Synge Street."

Rowland joins in with a piece of earlier history. "This had been a church, a Quaker Meeting Hall built in 1876, but in use as a store and offices by the time we came along. There was an elderly customer used come to us to have her boiler fixed and she'd met her husband at a dance here."

His father recalls landmark times in the company, and oil crises. "Initially we used Mini-Austins but moved on to Ford Escorts. The high point was when we had three vans in Cork, two in Limerick, one in Waterford and about 13 in Dublin. During one of the oil crisis, in the mid-1970s, we were on our way to Northern Ireland in a van for petrol when an Esso station in Dundalk filled us up. That kept us going for a couple of months."

By the time the next oil crisis arrived they'd converted the vans to liquid petroleum gas so that they could switch between it and petrol.

"That absolutely saved us when there was a long period during which we couldn't get any petrol at all," Gerry says. "Those were very hairy times! Because of the crises people became wary of oil and solid fuel ranges and backboilers became popular. Fuel merchants in Dublin combined together and formed a co-operative which provided back up and know-how and called itself Coal Information Services. It became a dominant force in heating services for many a year and we became installers of dual-purpose backboilers."

He laughs. "You had to be imaginative, resilient and flexible to survive! It's wasn't just us, it was the same for everyone in the business!"

Solid fuel/oil combinations went on for about 10 years until, in the late 1970s, gas arrived. "Dublin Gas had been supplying town gas to a limited number of customers but when natural gas came that was the really big change," Gerry explains, "with a completely new set of problems for us to become acquainted with. In 1989 we changed the name of the company to Oil and Gas Services Ltd."

Oil and Gas Services is one of very few companies who still service oil boilers. "The average age of an oil boiler is 15 years but there are some aged 30 out there and we're still looking after them," Gerry says.

Rowland, who joined the company in 1992, talks about the gas end of things. "It's a lot more complicated and EU regulations require you to be highly efficient. They see pilot lights as wasteful, for instance. Things are becoming totally electronic and more efficient while parts are becoming more expensive and harder to get. The gas boiler is more or less silent, and cleaner."

What about solar, or wind power? Rowland shakes his head, says he thinks it's a long way off, especially in Ireland. "The heating future's with gas, as far as I can see," he says.

Today's company is smaller and runs a fleet of seven Peugeot Partner vans. "Back in the oil-fired days we were installing boilers," Rowland says, "but we're not installing any more. At the height of the 'tiger economy' we couldn't get service engineers for love nor money and were turning work away in the winter of 2001. Now we've got seven excellent engineers and a services manager, Colm O'Connor. We've two full-time and two part-time workers in the office. We built an extension in 1997 and got new computers. You have to keep ahead."