A MALVERN woman is urging tenants to check their central heating boilers after hers began leaking carbon monoxide.

Rachel Marshall, an Elgar Housing Association tenant in Elgar Avenue, says she had to call in the emergency services after suffering headaches, dizziness and nausea.

She said: "I was told the waste pipe on my central heating boiler didn't comply with regulations, it should have had a 600cm pipe going straight up into the flue but instead it had one with an elbow and two bends. Soot was collecting in the pipes so that fumes were coming back into house. I turned it on one day and within a few minutes I had a headache and felt dizzy."

Ms Marshall called Elgar Housing Association but was told to call their sub-contractor Integral. She said: "They couldn't come out so I called Transco on their emergency gas line and while I was on the phone to them I fainted."

A Transco engineer turned off her heating system and it was repaired the next day by Integral. Mrs Marshall said the only visible sign of the leak was soot around the air vents.

"If I hadn't had it checked out I would have died," she said.

Clare Huyton, Elgar's executive director, said: " "New gas regulations that came in recently mean that pipes must go a certain way but there is nothing wrong with the way it was previously, it still meets regulations."

She added that some tenants choose not to have Elgar service their central heating boilers and 77 tenants had not had their boilers serviced in the last 12 months.

"We would like to remind them how important it is to get that done," she said.