Plumber has refurbished bathroom but left radiators not working! Advice please

Katw66

We have just had our bathroom refurbished and we are happy with the works done re: tiling, fitting of sanitary ware etc. However, after the plumber left on Thursday we discovered that we had no heating or hot water. We contacted him on Friday and he came round on Saturday to solve the problem. He vented the cistern and said he was sorry and that he should have done this originally and then left. Hours later we still had no heating so he came and said the pump needed replacing which he would do, but we would have to pay for it. My dad is a heating and ventilation engineer. He came round and told us the pump would not have seized if the system had been vented properly. We refused to pay for the pump, the plumber did not argue. We told him we would pay him for the works carried out on the bathroom when our heating was working properly. Two days later and the radiators downstairs are still not heating up. It does not seem fair that we should pay this man when he has left us without heating but we are happy with the work he has done in our bathroom. Where do we stand now? My dad is of the opinion that the plumber's knowledge of heating systems may not be adequate enough to repair it.

Mr.Generous

I guess he fitted a bathroom Rad / Towel warmer? Did he drain down the whole system or just isolate the bathroom Rad? Chances are pump was on its way out anyway, when you mess with heating you disturb sludge which gradually knackers the impeller. Run dry a pup will burn out, but a small volume of air in a system won't do that. Depends what he did. Combi or cylinder system? I don't know what venting the cistern means - venting the system is an absolute must to get things going, sometimes a bit of balancing too.

Katw66

Sorry, i did mean venting the system. There was air in the cylinder? He did fit a towel warmer and drain the system. The pump was less than ten years old.

Katw66

It is a cylinder system

tykesi

Post #5 reported, spamming is not allowed Richard although I'm sure you knew that already!

Alex1983

To be fair a 10 year old pump isn't exactly new and to think it couldn't fail is wrong. He drained your system and fitted a towel rail and the pump has seized he's now replaced the pump free and downstairs is not work, he's done nothing that any other plumber would of done.

You either have a airlock downstairs, he could turn off all the upstairs radiators and see if downstairs works then. If that doesn't cure it then you have issues with your system that he couldn't of controlled and I think if your happy with the bathroom work he should be paid and the downstairs radiators looked at on a chargeable basis.

macman

If you dad is a heating engineer, can he not fix it for you at cost? Does this really justify witholding 100% of the payment due to the plumber? Who is not a heating engineer...he may not be even Gas Safe Registered.

Katw66

Thanks for the advice, my Dad is away on holiday so I can no longer ask him, hence the reason I am on this forum. The house is over three floors. When the top radiators are switched off, 2nd floor comes on but not bottom floor. Only when all others are switched off can we have heat in our lounge and dining room. What does this mean? I agree withholding the full amount seems unfair - this is not a position I feel comfortable with, but come winter our house will be freezing. My Dad is elderly and we can't afford to pay someone else to come and repair it. Is it acceptable to offer to pay the majority now and the rest when the heating is working as it was before he arrived?

fezster

Katw66 wrote: »

Thanks for the advice, my Dad is away on holiday so I can no longer ask him, hence the reason I am on this forum. The house is over three floors. When the top radiators are switched off, 2nd floor comes on but not bottom floor. Only when all others are switched off can we have heat in our lounge and dining room. What does this mean? I agree withholding the full amount seems unfair - this is not a position I feel comfortable with, but come winter our house will be freezing. My Dad is elderly and we can't afford to pay someone else to come and repair it. Is it acceptable to offer to pay the majority now and the rest when the heating is working as it was before he arrived?

Is your heating system balanced? When he replaced the radiators he took off, did he adjust the valves to how they were? Balancing is very important in a CH system, otherwise a single radiator could allow the boiler to short circuit the rest of the system.

Katw66

The plumber is gas safety registered and surely if he is undertaking the task of replacing a radiator he/we should expect that the heating system be left in the same state as it was when he arrived?!? The technical terms that people are using (i.e. exchanging valves, balancing, venting systems ect,) seem to be standard practice when working on a central heating system, therefore, these are surely part of the original job that he agreed to do. If these are not done satisfactorily is it not his responsibility to rectify this? If this is the case he has not yet completed the work we are paying him for. If we'd known we would be left with no heating and have to pay someone else to fix it, we would not have had the bathroom refurbished in the first place. Would anybody?

Doozergirl

Whilst it's possible, I don't think it is likely that the heating system fails after a bathroom fit. It's certainly not happened to us yet - possibly because we usually work on new systems, but it hasn't happened on existing ones and I've definitely seen more bathroom renovations that most. I wouldn't price in the cost of pumps etc.

He's already taken on the cost of buying and fitting a new pump, which sounds pretty reasonable to me, especially if you're still withholding money that didn't include that new pump, and the existing one was 10 years old. That is pretty old. If your dad is elderly now, then I suspect he worked in the days when things just lasted longer .

In the interests of fairness, and actually what I would do as a consumer, is pay something for things to be balanced out now, as you're splitting the cost. There isn't a magic way of changing a rad so that your boiler is guaranteed not to break, or a way to guarantee it does. To that end, I don't think he's 100% at fault.

I remember my friend saying that a plumber broke his flush button when he used the toilet (not fixing it). I was shocked because he's a tradesperson himself and it was the straw that broke the camel's back, not the guy's fault.