Ideal Logic boiler spare parts warning and moan

Murmansk

My Ideal Logic combi boiler stopped working and the display said "PCB fault". Engineer has obtained a replacement circuit board for about £250 but in addition the board needs a chip so it knows what boiler it's been fitted to! 

How on earth they can justify charging £250 for a circuit board - it's not as though a boiler is really a very complicated item electronically when you think what must go on inside a cheap smartwatch or smartphone. All a boiler has to do is heat water up and pump it round! 

My advice to anyone thinking of installing an Ideal boiler is don't - they may be cheap to buy but when they go wrong they cost a fortune. I'd be interested to hear from anyone at Ideal who can justify the cost and tell us what enormously complex tasks the circuit board performs - and why having bought one, it then doesn't work without some more spending on a chip to tell it which boiler it's in! 

grumbler

TBF, it's the same for all spare parts, be it a boiler or a washing machine or a bicycle excluding, possibly some 'consumables' like filters, brake pads and similar. We live in crazy society where it's usually cheaper to replace a device than to repair it.

Not sure about the 'chip', but you can buy much cheaper a refurbished PCB with 12-month warranty.

tacpot12

The cost isn't in manufacturing in the board, which might cost £50 in components now that chips have got more expensive, but in the cost of stockholding. The warehouse space that all the spare parts occupy is expensive, as are the people or robots to retrieve the part when you need it.

The idea of a chip that defines the parameters of the board is a reasonable design choice, but charging for it, when the PCB is £250 is not reasonable. The PCB should come with the chip you need for the boiler, otherwise the PCB is just an extra stock keeping unit.

Unfortunately it is the same with all boilers; consumers should read the reviews to find out how reliable the boiler they are about to buy is, and avoid the unreliable ones.

ThisIsWeird

The actual component that failed is likely a 20p capacitor.

Sorry, that didn't help, did it

macman

Next time try these guys: I've used them for various repairs, including a boiler and a dishwasher.
https://www.qualityelectronicrepairs.co.uk/

Simonon77

Nearly all PCBs can be repaired, and as Weird says, it is normally a very cheap component to blame ( the main chips themselves very rarely fail on modern equipment ). The problem now is the 'engineers' don't know how to do this or diagnose a fault, so just put a whole new PCB in. It means the boiler companies make a lot more money, and the engineers don't need such specialist skills.

It is always worth looking for either PCB repair places near you, or ebay can be good or getting refurbished used boards with a guarantee on them .

Just this month I had a problem with an industrial printer board for work. Price for a used replacement board is over £1200, the repair cost me £4 in parts ( transistor had failed ) and less than an hour to remove it, diagnose, repair and refit.

ecraig

If the PCB is £250 and you need to pay extra for a chip of some sort, may be worth using ideals fixed price repair which is around £325 but also covers repairs and parts for the next 6 months.

I agree, these boilers are crap (compared with Worcester Bosch) and these ideal parts are pricey.

Simonon77

You should be able to take the chip from your old board and put onto the new PCB, I imagine this is why they sell them seperately? Chips rarely develop faults, it is nearly always capacitors or other small components around them thatfail

Murmansk

OP here. In the end my repairer got a new circuit board, then it wouldn't work without a chip as well. He got the chip and installed it in the OLD board and it worked! So I only needed the new chip which was £25 so I was suitably relieved!