Bad Advice from BG Homecare Engineers?

HaushinkaGreenDay

Hi all,

Just wanted to report a friend's experiences with British Gas Homecare engineers.

On at least three occasions, my friend has been given advice that, in my opinion, could have increased her gas/electric usage unnecessarily. She subscribes to BG's Homecare service, and is a BG customer for both gas and electric.

Details below:

1. Boiler broke, BG visited but couldn't repair same day, so advised to turn electric immersion on for hot water. All fair enough, except the engineer told my friend that keeping the immersion switched on all day would be cheaper than just turning it on for, say, an hour in AM and again in PM.

Their HW cylinder is 140 litres and at the time, was a busy household with 4 occupants showering every day (runs off cylinder) and usually also 1-2 baths on an evening.

IMO, would have been cheaper just to turn on AM/PM, as water was being used throughout the day and would cause thermostat to 'kick in' to keep temp to 60 degrees.

But that's just a minor point.

2. Boiler annual service; engineer stated couldn't work out how to programme my friend's Honeywell Digital CH/HW timer (!! - it's so easy I worked it out without the instructions - we have exactly the same in our flat, and I believe it's very common as I've seen it in many other households).

As a result, he set the HW timer to come on for 4 hours AM and 4 hours PM - total of 8 hours! (Don't quite know how he managed to do this if he allegedly couldn't work it) Gas usage went up after this visit.

3. Recently, boiler was fixed again. Engineer told my friend to have boiler set to 'LOW' all year round. Reason for this was unclear as I'm not sure my friend properly understood what he said, but something to do with limescale formation (we live in hard water area and I know that heating to higher temps does increase limescale formation, but boiler's over 20 years old already!) and that the boiler would operate more efficiently.

Boiler is an Ideal Elan 2, same as ours; in the manual, LOW setting = 60 degrees so wouldn't heat hot water to 60 due to heat losses to cylinder, causing the HW to call for heat during the entire programmed session (my partner's since adjusted it for her to 1hr AM, 1hr afternoon and 1hr30m PM).

I'm sure the radiators would also take a long time to heat my friend's large, draughty Victorian semi if the setting was 60 degrees instead of 81, again resulting in increased gas usage.

I've done the test myself using our boiler, and gas usage for HW only almost doubled :eek: using the LOW setting for timed periods of 2 hours in total, as the system was running for the entire timed sessions, rather than the 30 mins max heating time when set to HIGH. We have a large Victorian flat with a 96 litre cylinder, both of which are considerably smaller than my friend's house/cylinder.

I'm wondering if this might somehow be a ploy to bring in more revenue, as my friend is also with BG for gas/elec.

But whatever the reason, I'm sure there must be others out there who've had bad energy efficiency advice from the Homecare service, or any other boiler care service!

Any comments on the above would be much appreciated, especially from any other boiler engineers out there! :T

Haushinka

Joyful

I think you should be writing to the Servicing department so they can ask the engineer for reasons regarding the advice given.

Theo_Cupier

Erm, well my take is as follows:
1 & 2 will possibly have been done for customer convenience. If a "busy household with 4 occupants showering every day (runs off cylinder) and usually also 1-2 baths on an evening" are used to having hot water on demand from their boiler then it may be rather difficult for them to make an adjustment to working with a manually operated immersion heater. By having them leave the heater on it will be far more convenient. As you say, the thermostat on the tank ought to regulate the heater to a reasonable extent.

3. We have our boiler set to between 65-70 degrees, rather than the 85+ degrees it can achieve. If the problem is that your system is now continually working the boiler for hot water, maybe the problem is that the thermostat on your tank is either set too high or is not working properly. If your hot water cylinder is constantly needing to call for more heat, this suggests that it needs water hotter than the boiler can deliver. Personally I wouldn't want water much hotter than 60 Celsius coming out of my taps... equally it could suggest inefficient heat exchange in the hot water tank.

We have our boiler temperature setting at around the same as our well insulated hot water tank and we get a full tank of hot water in about 15 minutes and the boiler isn't usually called to top this up for a couple of hours if we don't draw any hot water.

As for the radiators, well I guess your mileage will vary, but we don't find ours too puny with this boiler setting in our not-exactly perfectly insulated (but double glazed) 1930s house.

Pssst

Advice relating to useage of appliances and energy efficiency is purely that-advice. It is not an instruction or a formal contract of any kind. Because different situations are so massively variable,such advice can only be general. One thing is for sure though is that to heat a given mass of water (for eg),a particulr amount of energy is required. That cannot change so whether you apply that heat quickly over a short period,or slowly over a longer period,the same amount of energy will be required if we disregard heat losses and efficiencies etc.

Now then,given that the immersion heater has a built in stat and that hopefully your friend has a foam lagged cylinder,and given that the hot water demand is high,it would seem that the immersion would need to be on for a good length of time anyway?

The ideal Elan is not exactly cutting edge technology.

The only true way to conserve energy is not to use it.

Eg wear suitable clothing.