For weeks, Ollie Gilcreest left home dressed for sixth form, changed into overalls at a garage two roads away, then put the suit back on before returning home. His mum eventually noticed that his supposed school run involved increasingly relaxed mornings. It was a fairly elaborate route into the trades, even by Off The Job standards.
In Season 1, Episode 1, hosts Keiran Yates and Pete Withers meet the gas engineer behind the Heating Geek YouTube channel. Ollie talks about getting into gas engineering, diagnosing boiler faults under serious pressure, filming videos for other engineers and building a working life around the bit he actually likes: fixing things. If you have never heard the podcast before, this is a good place to start. The stories are useful; the route through them is anything but tidy.
Who is Ollie Gilcreest, the Heating Geek?
Ollie is a UK gas engineer whose Heating Geek videos grew out of a practical problem at work. He had started in a garage, but his dad arranged an interview with a gas company. Ollie wasn’t looking for a grand career pivot. He took the job, began in the stores learning the parts, and moved on to an apprenticeship with an installer.
He remembers earning about £65 a week at the start. That number belongs to his early career, not a current apprentice wage, but it helps explain the very unglamorous beginnings behind the channel. No content strategy. Just an unexpected interview, a parts store and a lot to learn.
What taught him to find boiler faults?
One breakdown role meant travelling across north London and, by Ollie’s account, seeing 20 or 21 jobs on some days. It sounds exhausting because it was. There was pressure to get the diagnosis right, pressure to keep moving and little patience for a job coming back. Ollie describes learning to think carefully before ordering parts, especially when the cost of a wrong call could hit the job’s profit.
That makes for a useful conversation about fault-finding, but this is a story about an engineer’s experience, not a set of boiler repair instructions. The best bit is hearing how the pressure changed the way he approached a problem. The worst bit, presumably, was having another address to get to when most people would have called it a day four jobs ago.
And then there is the Christmas Eve pump. Ollie recalls a boiler pump failing while a customer was expecting roughly 16 people for Christmas. The customer was furious and told him he’d ruined Christmas. If you’ve ever been the person standing beside a dead appliance while the entire household looks at you, you’ll recognise the silence that follows.
Why did Ollie start making Heating Geek videos?
Later, while working in quality control for a company with around 40 engineers, Ollie began filming recurring fault scenarios for the engineers’ WhatsApp group. The idea was simple: if one person had found a problem, the next engineer could recognise it sooner and avoid a repeat visit. Those clips became videos on YouTube.
That’s what gives the Heating Geek story its appeal. The channel began as one tradesperson showing other tradespeople what he’d seen on real jobs. It was aimed at engineers trying to improve their diagnosis, not at homeowners looking for a Sunday afternoon boiler project. He also talks honestly about filming more than he has time to edit, so don’t read this as a promise of a weekly upload schedule.
Can you build a gas engineering business and stay on the tools?
Ollie would rather solve a fault than spend the afternoon managing an inbox. At the time of the recording, he had tried an online booking model where private customers paid upfront for a fixed-price visit. It sounded neat on paper; running it still needed management and investment. He says he had moved away from that model and preferred contract work, with office support handling much of the organisation.
There is a good business lesson tucked between the stories: being good at the work and wanting to run every part of a business are different things. Ollie jokes about being lazy, then describes a career spent learning difficult faults, helping other engineers and finding ways to stay useful on the tools. Some version of “lazy” that is.
Where can you watch Off The Job S1E1?
Watch Ollie Gilcreest’s full Off The Job episode on YouTube for the Christmas Eve call-out, the career detours and the stories that won’t fit neatly into a blog post. Keiran and Pete give him room to tell them properly.
The conversation also gets onto paper job pads, digital records and the admin that follows an engineer home. If that’s the part of the job you’d gladly hand off, Gas Certificate App helps UK gas engineers create certificates and manage job paperwork digitally. Ollie’s story is his own; the app is a practical option for keeping your records in order.
New to the show? Read about CW Dizz starting plumbing at 35 for another Off The Job conversation about taking an unexpected route into the trade.
