Gas boiler condemned!

cmhbyandco

We have a 10 year old Valiant boiler that has just been condemned because of a rusty chassis. Valiant do not do a spare so British Gas has said we need a new boiler. British Gas has been servicing it for 4 years under the Home service cover & have done any repairs. Surely if there had been a leak, they should have spotted it before it got to this situation?

I am very annoyed because I feel they have let us down by not spotting a problem.
Any advice would be very welcome please.

Browntoa

Get a 2nd opinion from an independent , but I suspect it's been condemned for legit reasons and replacing the chassis will involve total removal anyway.

The service only says it's safe , as do any repairs , they leak may have been missed by you since the last service


Particularly as British gas will charge a lot more for replacement get several quotes for replacement

k3lvc

I've just has a similar issue with a leak from our boiler at 9yrs 10mths from installation. Luckily we'd paid many times over as we'd had continuous BG HomeCare since installation so they replaced free of charge with no questions asked. Having weighed up the costs I've no cancelled HomeCare for the future and putting the monthly money away in a pot - let's see how I come out in 10yrs :rotfl:

Aylesbury_Duck

Read the terms and conditions of your service agreement with them. It may not include an annual assessment of everything. In my experience, these service contracts are priced to the bone, with a quick in-and-out "service" being the only way they can make money on volumes of customers.

I had cover with SSE for a few years but now I know a decent gas man, I've taken out the very basic cover without an annual service and my chap now does the service for me. The first one he did shocked him - he couldn't believe the build up of muck and dust in just one year and suggested they hadn't been doing a thorough job each year.

JimmyChanga

I had a similar situation with a repair plan. The engineer claimed there was excessive corrosion, the gas valve was missing a rivet and that the divertor valve was ready to break. How he'd figured this out without x-ray eyes was a mystery to me. So they wrote it off under 'uneconomical repair'.
I had the feeling he was talking bull.

I confronted the insurance plan company that I'd paid for their top service which stated whatever part was needed would be used. They then claimed the part needed was no longer available and that's why they wrote it off. This was also a lie.

I replaced the boiler and took apart the old one. All of it was complete crap. In fact the fault lay at a previous recent repair that they had not done properly.

Nothing would surprise me about British Gas. They left someone I knew without a working boiler because the valve on the filling loop was leaking. He turned it off and said he needed to get the part. What kind of boiler engineer doesn't carry a standard filling loop valve?

The whole industry is as bent as car garages used to be.

As for services on these contracts, they're a joke. They just do the gas safety test and pretend about everything else. They might poke the schrader valve on the expansion tank to see if it has air (further reducing the pressure!) and that's about it.

cmhbyandco

I've complained to British Gas because I feel that as part of the service, a leak should have been picked up. We've had 4 engineers here recently for servicing & sorting out a high pressure. Each one has said it was something new wrong with the boiler! The one today was changing a corroded pipe & he condemned the boiler because he couldn't put the pipe back.



I agree that the insurance is a not worth the paper it's written on. You have the boiler serviced to keep it in good shape & to check for any faults but they have failed in all aspects.


I'm waiting for them to call me back after an investigation.

fred246

I was in the gym recently and overheard a conversation between 2 gas installers. Apparently their company had taken on a new man. He was upsetting the customers because his 'services' were literally seconds. The 2 were agreeing that you had to mess about for a bit longer. Ask a few questions to pretend to be interested and mess about for a few minutes to make the customer think that they had earned their money.

southcoastrgi

Contractors (yes they do use quite a few sub contractors) get between £20-£23 a service & have around 10 a day to do, I'd be surprised if your case is even taken off the boiler so I'm not sure how they would see a leak

TELLIT01

Our boiler was installed by British Gas and has been serviced by them ever since. To say the interest taken by the engineer during service is variable is a massive understatement. Last year the service seemed to be done very quickly, but I had no way to know if everything had been done properly or not. This year, when the engineer finished, he said the filter was absolutely filthy and he didn't believe it was cleaned last year!