As a service engineer he covered mostly Exmoor, servicing and maintaining oil fired boilers and cookers. His first van was a mini-van, and to this day he still swears it went better in the snow than the modern vans. Especially in the bad winters of 1978 and 1979.
Over a period of 24 years between 1970 and 1994 John witnessed extensive changes at Elston Oils. Elston Oils became distributors for several different companies before eventually selling their oil business to Butler Fuels, who later became Total Butler.
In 1994 the then Butler Fuels decided to close the servicing and maintenance department and concentrate on just the oil deliveries. Having built great relationships with his regular customers over a period of some 24 years, plus with their backing, John decided to start up on his own. Today we still serve many of these original customers, some even still live in the same properties John first visited back in 1970.
So in May 1994 John Freegard Heating Engineers was born.
Within months of starting up John gained both technician and company registration with the newly created Oil Firing Technical Associated, or OFTEC as they are more commonly known. We continue to maintain this registration today; our OFTEC Company Registration Number is 74. We are not aware of a company within the region that has been OFTEC registered for longer.
In 1995, after just over 8 months of trading and with workload increasing by the day, Kevin joined the business. Kevin was a car mechanic at the Premier Garage in Alcombe. Whilst John was mending the large hot air units in the garage Kevin and John got talking, and well the rest is history.
Today the team consists of John, Kevin, Dene and Simon. Dene joined in 2005 from a mechanical background and Simon, John’s son, returned to the business in 2010. Simon grew up helping out with the business at weekends and during school holidays before studying engineering at university.
As a team, we have over 65 years experience servicing and maintaining oil fired appliances.
