New on EVH: Is your heating down - or is it just you?

If you've ever lost heating or hot water and spent ten minutes scrolling through the East Village Connect WhatsApp group trying to work out whether it's your flat or the whole estate - this one's for you.

We've just added a live outage status widget to the District Heating page. It does one thing: tells you whether other residents are reporting the same problem right now.

How it works

When your heating goes off, head to the District Heating page. If other residents have already reported an issue in the last six hours, you'll see how many and when the most recent report came in. If you're the first - or if you want to add your voice - you can log your own report in one tap. No account needed, no form to fill in.

The widget updates automatically every minute, and outages clear from the list after 6 hours.

You'll find it on the homepage too, in the Quick Access section. In normal times, it's barely noticeable - a quiet green strip. When reports are coming in, it becomes the most obvious thing on the page. Which is exactly what you want at 7am with no hot water.

Why we built it

District heating is the single most talked-about topic in East Village. East London Energy have a monopoly on supply here, outages aren't rare, and when they happen the first question is always the same: is this just me?

Right now that question gets answered - eventually - in the WhatsApp group. Which is fine, but it means you're dependent on someone else posting first, at the right time, and you seeing it. This gives that question a permanent home.

It won't fix the heating. But it might save you ten minutes on hold to GetLiving before you know whether it's worth calling.

The district heating page

While we were in there, we also restructured the page itself. The contact numbers - GetLiving for faults, ELE for billing - are now at the top, not buried three sections in. If you arrive mid-crisis, you shouldn't have to read about how combined heat and power works before finding a phone number.