New British Gas Boiler Complaint

blueteacup

Hi,

i don't know if anyone can advise but at least I can get this off my chest and advise everybody else not to get a boiler from British Gas. I'll try to be brief, but basically we feel we were badly misled by BG and don't know what we can do about it.

Last year when we had our 20 year old boiler serviced by BG the engineer passed it but said it was so old and inefficient a new one would cost around £2000 and would be so efficient it would pay for itself in a few years. 

We went ahead and bought one even the we were told the final cost was around £3700. The fitting was not a success, the engineer lefts bits of old piping all over the house, scratched a cupboard and had to come back a few days later to replace a pipe he'd overlooked.

But that's not the end of it. We've probably called out BG for minor problems more times in the last year than we called them out in the last ten years with our old boiler. 

And just to rub salt in the wounds our bills don't seem any smaller - even though gas prices have dropped.

I don't know if it's even worth writing to British Gas about it. Ideally we'd like our old boiler back but obviously that's not possible.

Any advice apart from "never use British Gas for anything" would be appreciated.

ThisIsWeird

Hi btc.

Anyone who's been on here for any length of time will know to avoid BG. They have an earned reputation for 'condemning' boilers which are still perfectly serviceable, and for being one of the most expensive installers. You have seemingly scored the hat trick of also finding an incompetent 'engineer'...

Make and models of both, please - the old and the new?

And, what issues are you having with the new?

I am surprised, tho', that you aren't finding reduced consumption, as your 20-year old jobbie was almost certainly not a condensing type. Possibly the new one can be tweaked to perform more efficiently - ie, the cooler it runs, the better.

This being a MSE site, the MSE 'way' with boilers is to keep them running for as long as you possibly can! It's going to take you a couple of decades to recoup energy savings from your new boiler to cover the cost of the newbie, and that's if you get it working better :-( 

If you had any evidence for their claims, then I'd be inclined to pursue this. But if you don't...

Albermarle

From my own experience, switching to a modern condensing boiler should save about 15% gas ( others may have other figures).
However that is with a boiler flow temperature of 60 to 65 degrees (depending on how cold the weather is)
OP - If the boiler flow temperature is set too high, you lose efficiency/savings.
For some reason heating engineers ( not just BG) tend to leave the boiler flow temperature too high, after working on the boiler.

Also of course I am referring to a new boiler that works smoothly, which this one clearly is not doing.

FreeBear

Must admit, when I had my old boiler (Baxi Bermuda from the 80s) replaced, BG didn't even get a look in. Due to the amount of plumbing required for a combi replacement, I did all the work myself to keep costs down. Plumbing, radiators, and boiler (fitted by a Gas Safe engineer) still cost most of £3K.

I had got my annual gas consumption down to ~3000kWh with the old boiler. With the new one, still around the same. But this last winter, the heating seems to have been on more than in previous years even although the mean average temperature outside was 1.2°C above the 1991-2020 average (Source - Met Office).

Being a low user of gas, the savings, if any, are going to be minimal. So I'm unlikely to recover the cost within the next 10-15 years. But having things like instant hot water at mains pressure and space in the airing cupboard make up for it. Still tweaking settings, so there may be some reductions in gas consumption still to be had.

daveyjp

If your 20 year old boiler was a condensing boiler it is doubtful a newer combi would be signifcantly more efficient.

The updated model of my almost 15 year old boiler has just been released, the first model came to the market in 2004.  There have been some changes to improve efficiency over the years, but 15 years ago stated efficiency was about 90%, improvements on this with the newer model will be marginal.

bluelad1927

blueteacup said:

Hi,

i don't know if anyone can advise but at least I can get this off my chest and advise everybody else not to get a boiler from British Gas. I'll try to be brief, but basically we feel we were badly misled by BG and don't know what we can do about it.

Last year when we had our 20 year old boiler serviced by BG the engineer passed it but said it was so old and inefficient a new one would cost around £2000 and would be so efficient it would pay for itself in a few years. 

We went ahead and bought one even the we were told the final cost was around £3700. The fitting was not a success, the engineer lefts bits of old piping all over the house, scratched a cupboard and had to come back a few days later to replace a pipe he'd overlooked.

But that's not the end of it. We've probably called out BG for minor problems more times in the last year than we called them out in the last ten years with our old boiler. 

And just to rub salt in the wounds our bills don't seem any smaller - even though gas prices have dropped.

I don't know if it's even worth writing to British Gas about it. Ideally we'd like our old boiler back but obviously that's not possible.

Any advice apart from "never use British Gas for anything" would be appreciated.

A review of a company does not make it a good or bad company. It just tells a story of an experience.

I had a boiler fitted by BG two years ago
 I'm not a fan of them but 0% interest and 5 yrs servicing and callouts at a heavily reduced rate brought the cost well in line with heating engineers (without the callout cover etc)

Two years on and it's worked perfectly.

In contrast, I got a reputable heating company to replace the hot water tank and it took them multiple attempts and revisits to get it working as it should. This was not a cheap installation but far more problematic than the boiler experience.

It's unfortunate that you had this experience  but its often a flip of a coin whoever you deal with

ThisIsWeird

Albermarle said:

For some reason heating engineers ( not just BG) tend to leave the boiler flow temperature too high, after working on the boiler.

Very possibly because they don't want the customer calling them back to complain that "their rads ain't as hot as before..."

blueteacup

bluelad1927 said:

blueteacup said:

Hi,

i don't know if anyone can advise but at least I can get this off my chest and advise everybody else not to get a boiler from British Gas. I'll try to be brief, but basically we feel we were badly misled by BG and don't know what we can do about it.

Last year when we had our 20 year old boiler serviced by BG the engineer passed it but said it was so old and inefficient a new one would cost around £2000 and would be so efficient it would pay for itself in a few years. 

We went ahead and bought one even the we were told the final cost was around £3700. The fitting was not a success, the engineer lefts bits of old piping all over the house, scratched a cupboard and had to come back a few days later to replace a pipe he'd overlooked.

But that's not the end of it. We've probably called out BG for minor problems more times in the last year than we called them out in the last ten years with our old boiler. 

And just to rub salt in the wounds our bills don't seem any smaller - even though gas prices have dropped.

I don't know if it's even worth writing to British Gas about it. Ideally we'd like our old boiler back but obviously that's not possible.

Any advice apart from "never use British Gas for anything" would be appreciated.

A review of a company does not make it a good or bad company. It just tells a story of an experience.

I had a boiler fitted by BG two years ago
 I'm not a fan of them but 0% interest and 5 yrs servicing and callouts at a heavily reduced rate brought the cost well in line with heating engineers (without the callout cover etc)

Two years on and it's worked perfectly.

In contrast, I got a reputable heating company to replace the hot water tank and it took them multiple attempts and revisits to get it working as it should. This was not a cheap installation but far more problematic than the boiler experience.

It's unfortunate that you had this experience  but its often a flip of a coin whoever you deal with

Hi, thanks to everybody who has replied, it's all much appreciated, I wish I'd seen this forum before I got rid of my perfectly good boiler. I'll reply to other posts tomorrow but i'll reply to this one now as it seems to tally with mine except with a better outcome.

Looking back the sales pitch felt like a dodgy double glazing salesman. we were originally quoted a very high price, I think closer to £5k, but one by one they came up with reductions which eventually knocked around £1k off - trade in of old boiler, special deal if signing up quickly, and, like you 0% interest. But looking back the price was still way higher than we originally expected, they just pulled the trick of quoting high then knocking things off to make it seem like a good deal.
A friendly gas safe engineer did say it sounded like a competitive deal so we went for it. but then when we had a problem and BG was slow to respond I rang my independent engineer and he said "reset your TRVs (individual radiator valves). I said "what TRVs? they didn't fit any". turns out he thought good price would include about 12 TRVs which it didn't so not such a good price after all...

Our independent engineer also said insist on a BG engineer not a sub-contractor - his words were "If you get a BG engineer you've got a chance of them fitting it correctly, if it's a sub-contractor no chance". At every stage we said we wanted a BG employee. Two days before the fitting they called and we said in passing "it is a BG engineer isn't it" they said "no". Appointment was changed so they could find one for us...

The fitting included a power flush but if anything the radiators are less efficient - often cold at the bottom. We've been told that there's no way they could've done a full power flush in the time they were there.

Going back to your reply we have similar to you – 5 year guarantee and free Homecare cover for one year, then half price Homecare for another year then full price Homecare. And I've got a sneaking suspicion that when we have to pay full price for Homecare it will be more than it was on our old boiler because we've called them out so much - even though we only called them out because they fitted the new boiler so badly...