What's the best way to get a new CH boiler?

[swee'pea99]

It's deid. There's no getting round it. Red light flashing. Restart, hums away for a second or three, red light starts flashing again.

It's done us proud - 20 years+, and with no servicing whatsoever - but all good things must come to an end, and it's ended. Kaput. It's been grumbling for a year or more, and we knew it was only a question of time, so we'd already decided that the next time it went it would be a case of so long and thanks for all the fish, so...

We need a new one. And we need it fitted. Question is, how best to go about it.

I already know it's going to be a Worcestor Bosch. The guy who fitted it said in his experience they're the best at coping with London water, and...well, 20 years speaks for itself. We could just go direct to WB, and have them fit it and the whole bit. But is that our best option? Or might we be better off going with an independent?

A couple of things to add to the mix...

We don't want any kind of service contract. Strictly fit & forget, then fix as & when it goes pear shaped. Other opinions may vary, but it's the way we're going. We think it's the most cost effective way to go, over time, and 20 years blah de blah...

I'm pretty sure I can figure out which boiler we'd want. Basically by comparing specs with the one we have now (a 28i Junior, FWIW). But might we be able to get a better price by looking online/going to Screwfix/other? Might an independent get the hump at our doing this, viewing the markup on a new one part of their fee for the installation? Do they vary? Some might mind, others might not? Or is there basically only one way this whole business works?

Basically, as per the subject line, any advice/recommendations/hints & tips very much appreciated. It's a biggy, and we want to get it right. Any help/thoughts, thanks.

 

[mjr]

Will there be gas in 20 years? Fools are talking up hydrogen but I'm happy to be heat pumping, but that can't compete on price with mains gas right now while the electricity price in set by the gas price, so I can understand anyone not taking that would be a leap of faith in market reform.

I would price it over ten years not twenty at the moment. It may need conversion or replacement after that.

 

[Lina Roth]

It's great that you have already decided on a Worcester Bosch boiler, as they have a good reputation for reliability and efficiency.

 

[Electric_Andy]

I think the best way to go about it (if it were me) is to get 2 or 3 quotes. 1 from an independent Gas CH specialist and see if they can get the model you want, and get a quote for the boiler and fitting. Second, get a price from the Boiler main supplier and a quote from one of their approved fitters. Thirdly, shop around for the best price on the boiler you want. Phone another independent and say "I've got this new boiler, how much to fit it"? I wouldn't have thought there would be a huge difference, but who knows. There are some garages for example who won't fit parts supplied by the customer, as it prevents them earning their cut on the parts they order in (and charge you a bit more for).

 

[swee'pea99]

Thanks! Interesting. A fair point, and one that hadn't occurred to me.

By way of an initial answer, when we had our kitchen totally rebuilt/extended, the guv'nor of the company that did it said he could find someone to move & reinstall the boiler, but his recommendation would be to ditch it and install some innovative new type such as....

I said that a) I reckoned it had a good few years life left in it, b) even by current standards, it was recognised as an efficient and fuel-efficient unit, and c) it was old school, which meant it was tried and trusted technology, which I always instinctively prefer to anything innovative. I like to let other people find the bugs in 'innovative' and wait till I see a pattern of long term reliability before I take the plunge. Tried & tested has always worked for me. So if you could simply move it, that would be grand. That was 12 years ago. It still feels like the right decision.

So while I take your point about a 10 year timeframe, I'll take a lot of persuading not to go with a tried & tested gas combi again.

 

[swee'pea99]

I think the best way to go about it (if it were me) is to get 2 or 3 quotes. 1 from an independent Gas CH specialist and see if they can get the model you want, and get a quote for the boiler and fitting. Second, get a price from the Boiler main supplier and a quote from one of their approved fitters. Thirdly, shop around for the best price on the boiler you want. Phone another independent and say "I've got this new boiler, how much to fit it"? I wouldn't have thought there would be a huge difference, but who knows. There are some garages for example who won't fit parts supplied by the customer, as it prevents them earning their cut on the parts they order in (and charge you a bit more for).

Thanks. Very interesting...and makes very good sense. Re your point about garages/parts, that's absolutely been my experience, and was part of my thinking about this. I have found, and always use, a small independent garage which has no problem with me getting parts and charging an hourly rate to fit them. But I did previously have 'no mate' responses to phone queries along those lines. So they do vary, is what you're saying. That's helpful. Much appreciated.

 

[a.twiddler]

It seems that the OP has been very fortunate with his boiler experience.
Consumer items seem to be all about the service contract nowadays. We had years of paying British Gas to send someone round annually to basically dust off and hoover our old steam age Baxi, and try to get us to upgrade to something newer as "parts might soon be unavailable". It was a pretty simple beast, and parts were still available when we finally upgraded to a condensing boiler when it was 33 years old. The benefit of paying for a service contract is usually that you can get someone out to fix it if it conks out, usually in the middle of winter when all your local plumbers are busy. The rest of the year you are paying your premium for basically nothing, which rankles. By this time we'd been using a local chap for a while for plumbing jobs and it was him that fitted the new one. The warranty was for 12 months or 2 years I think, and we were able to call on him in case of any problems. We didn't sign up for a servicing contract. The boiler worked fine for about 5 years. We'd been told by our plumber that what with the modern electronics and systems you would be doing really well to get 12 years out of a modern one, as the repair costs could get to the point that it was just uneconomic to fix compared with fitting a new one.
At around 5 years we began getting all sorts of fault codes, some of which were in the manual and we could follow up, others, "refer to installer".
We were unable to contact our regular plumber who had unfortunately died in the meantime. We tried several plumbers who were unable to fix it. It seems finding a gas safe plumber is only half the problem, finding one who knows what they're doing is the other half. It does seem that if they're going to charge you the hourly rate for fault finding which ends up with changing components until they find a fix that works, it is definitely more economic to fit a new boiler. Also, they'd rather spend time fitting a new one that takes a defined time to fit, than spend indefinite time tracing your fault when they have other jobs on that can fit into a schedule. So the common response to many problems now seems to be that if they can't solve some obvious fault, after some arbitrary time spent troubleshooting, you will need a new boiler.
The next problem was that they were all tied up in the middle of a cold spell. Eventually we found someone to supply and fit one. Hobson's choice. All fitted and fine. However he has since been uncontactable, and the boiler is heading for 5 years old, so far with no issues.

We are just hoping that this one keeps on going. It looks like the luck of the draw, it might last, it might not, so after finding a suitable deal for buying and fitting, that is just the start of it. It seems that even the most reputable boiler might develop an expensive and terminal fault outside the guarantee period, even if your current one doesn't fail in the middle of a cold spell leaving you freezing cold and desperate to get anything fitted that works.

When the heat pump programme gets going, no doubt we will start to have a whole new set of interesting issues.

Our local independent garage has been very good about letting me buy my own parts for them to fit at the hourly rate. Mind you, they've had a lot of my money over the years. In these difficult times, i do wonder how long they'll be able to continue doing this.

 

[cyberknight]

It seems that the OP has been very fortunate with his boiler experience.
Consumer items seem to be all about the service contract nowadays. We had years of paying British Gas to send someone round annually to basically dust off and hoover our old steam age Baxi, and try to get us to upgrade to something newer as "parts might soon be unavailable". It was a pretty simple beast, and parts were still available when we finally upgraded to a condensing boiler when it was 33 years old. The benefit of paying for a service contract is usually that you can get someone out to fix it if it conks out, usually in the middle of winter when all your local plumbers are busy. The rest of the year you are paying your premium for basically nothing, which rankles. By this time we'd been using a local chap for a while for plumbing jobs and it was him that fitted the new one. The warranty was for 12 months or 2 years I think, and we were able to call on him in case of any problems. We didn't sign up for a servicing contract. The boiler worked fine for about 5 years. We'd been told by our plumber that what with the modern electronics and systems you would be doing really well to get 12 years out of a modern one, as the repair costs could get to the point that it was just uneconomic to fix compared with fitting a new one.
At around 5 years we began getting all sorts of fault codes, some of which were in the manual and we could follow up, others, "refer to installer".
We were unable to contact our regular plumber who had unfortunately died in the meantime. We tried several plumbers who were unable to fix it. It seems finding a gas safe plumber is only half the problem, finding one who knows what they're doing is the other half. It does seem that if they're going to charge you the hourly rate for fault finding which ends up with changing components until they find a fix that works, it is definitely more economic to fit a new boiler. Also, they'd rather spend time fitting a new one that takes a defined time to fit, than spend indefinite time tracing your fault when they have other jobs on that can fit into a schedule. So the common response to many problems now seems to be that if they can't solve some obvious fault, after some arbitrary time spent troubleshooting, you will need a new boiler.
The next problem was that they were all tied up in the middle of a cold spell. Eventually we found someone to supply and fit one. Hobson's choice. All fitted and fine. However he has since been uncontactable, and the boiler is heading for 5 years old, so far with no issues.

We are just hoping that this one keeps on going. It looks like the luck of the draw, it might last, it might not, so after finding a suitable deal for buying and fitting, that is just the start of it. It seems that even the most reputable boiler might develop an expensive and terminal fault outside the guarantee period, even if your current one doesn't fail in the middle of a cold spell leaving you freezing cold and desperate to get anything fitted that works.

When the heat pump programme gets going, no doubt we will start to have a whole new set of interesting issues.

Our local independent garage has been very good about letting me buy my own parts for them to fit at the hourly rate. Mind you, they've had a lot of my money over the years. In these difficult times, i do wonder how long they'll be able to continue doing this.

I agree with the above especially if you have kids / vulnerable in the house.
We have the rads and pipework covered too which was good when we sprung a leak and had water coming through the ceiling .
One call to them mentioning we had kids and they were around asap to sort it out , another time one of the rads packed up and was replaced and just a couple of weeks ago one stopped working as the thermostat valve was jammed .To be fair the last one i could have done easily but it was the week i was off with my back so i couldnt get down to do it

 

[swee'pea99]

It seems that the OP has been very fortunate with his boiler experience.
Consumer items seem to be all about the service contract nowadays. We had years of paying British Gas to send someone round annually to basically dust off and hoover our old steam age Baxi, and try to get us to upgrade to something newer as "parts might soon be unavailable". It was a pretty simple beast, and parts were still available when we finally upgraded to a condensing boiler when it was 33 years old. The benefit of paying for a service contract is usually that you can get someone out to fix it if it conks out, usually in the middle of winter when all your local plumbers are busy. The rest of the year you are paying your premium for basically nothing, which rankles. By this time we'd been using a local chap for a while for plumbing jobs and it was him that fitted the new one. The warranty was for 12 months or 2 years I think, and we were able to call on him in case of any problems. We didn't sign up for a servicing contract. The boiler worked fine for about 5 years. We'd been told by our plumber that what with the modern electronics and systems you would be doing really well to get 12 years out of a modern one, as the repair costs could get to the point that it was just uneconomic to fix compared with fitting a new one.
At around 5 years we began getting all sorts of fault codes, some of which were in the manual and we could follow up, others, "refer to installer".
We were unable to contact our regular plumber who had unfortunately died in the meantime. We tried several plumbers who were unable to fix it. It seems finding a gas safe plumber is only half the problem, finding one who knows what they're doing is the other half. It does seem that if they're going to charge you the hourly rate for fault finding which ends up with changing components until they find a fix that works, it is definitely more economic to fit a new boiler. Also, they'd rather spend time fitting a new one that takes a defined time to fit, than spend indefinite time tracing your fault when they have other jobs on that can fit into a schedule. So the common response to many problems now seems to be that if they can't solve some obvious fault, after some arbitrary time spent troubleshooting, you will need a new boiler.
The next problem was that they were all tied up in the middle of a cold spell. Eventually we found someone to supply and fit one. Hobson's choice. All fitted and fine. However he has since been uncontactable, and the boiler is heading for 5 years old, so far with no issues.

We are just hoping that this one keeps on going. It looks like the luck of the draw, it might last, it might not, so after finding a suitable deal for buying and fitting, that is just the start of it. It seems that even the most reputable boiler might develop an expensive and terminal fault outside the guarantee period, even if your current one doesn't fail in the middle of a cold spell leaving you freezing cold and desperate to get anything fitted that works.

When the heat pump programme gets going, no doubt we will start to have a whole new set of interesting issues.

Our local independent garage has been very good about letting me buy my own parts for them to fit at the hourly rate. Mind you, they've had a lot of my money over the years. In these difficult times, i do wonder how long they'll be able to continue doing this.

Again, many thanks.

We have indeed been very lucky. To cut a short story a bit longer, when I say it had no servicing at all, I mean exactly that. Never have I in any field paid someone money to 'service' anything. To fix, yes. So, no checkups. But it did obviously need a couple of visits over those 20 years. One of which was...

Something major had clearly gone badly wrong. Only to be expected, after ten or so serviceless years. Did a bit of googling/asking around, like this, and called in the real McCoy. Worcestor Bosch man came to replace The Big Bit that had died. Very nice man. And when it came time to flash the cash he said that if it was him he would sign up for a year. It wouldn't cost much more than the cost for the one repair, and that was genuinely a good deal for a boiler of that age. Made perfect sense: where do I sign? Eight months later, dead boiler. Call WB. Return of Worcestor Bosch man. Same man, if I remember rightly. Very nice man. Who fixed the boiler again, taking away, again, a fair lump of expensive-looking innards. Told us a combi boiler is essentially two big lumps of kit sitting on top of each other, surrounded by bits. He'd replaced one on his previous visit; now he'd replaced t'other. "What you have there is not far off a new boiler." Which made perfect sense. And of course meant among other things that we had no need of an annual contract...

 

[mjr]

When the heat pump programme gets going, no doubt we will start to have a whole new set of interesting issues.

I think we can already guess from problems seen during the Renewable Heat Initiative and the early days of Boiler Upgrade Scheme what most of them will be: dodgy installers trying to make them imitate oversized gas boilers (doomed to fail or at least eat money) and some importers who think they know better than the manufacturers and attempt to override the master controls with on/off gas boiler controls from the likes of Honeywell, plus failures to complete the commissioning and paperwork.

The heat pumps themselves are actually less complicated than a condensing combi boiler: just a pump, compressor, valves and pipes — no injectors, mantle, ignition, turbines, baffles, exhaust or whatever your fuel source requires. The difficulty is that they are more expensive to buy per kW — so no more whacking a stupidly overpowerful 26kW unit into a 3-bed semi — and the controllers are smart to wring every last kW out so need to be set up correctly.

That said, I think an annual service check is a good idea with a heat pump both because they're expensive to buy so keeping the warranty is good, and because often both refrigerants and washing water are in the system and you really don't want even small leaks from either, let alone between the two!

The government have been very very clever with this winter's TV ads suggesting people turn their boiler central heating flow temperature down. As well as saving gas now, anyone who turned it down below 50°c and stayed warm enough on the coldest days probably won't need to change all their radiators or pipes when upgrading to a heat pump. Below 45 and that's pretty much certain.

 

[CXRAndy]

You can get high output heat pumps.

For example Daikin do a model called Altherma which will heat radiators to over 60°C

 

[gbb]

my recent experience...
25 + year old boiler (glow worm), needed little or no work in its life but we decided to replace before it failed.
Given a recommendation with a local guy, went for a Weissman boiler and new tank, full system flush plus ancillaries. He reckoned a normal quote would be IRO £5 to £6K which tbf, I thought was expensive. He came in at £3300 IIRC, breakdown of costs was
Boiler purchase price around £1400
Hot water tank and immersion heater, around £150
Full system flush is almost a days work in itself..some places charge pushing £500 just for that.
Plus his time, costs.

Ours took 2 to 4 days installation but that possibly isn't normal, we were away so plumber had the freedom to come and go as he wished, allowing him to do other work if he needed, wanted.

Recommendations is the key

 

[gbb]

Again, many thanks.

We have indeed been very lucky. To cut a short story a bit longer, when I say it had no servicing at all, I mean exactly that. Never have I in any field paid someone money to 'service' anything. To fix, yes. So, no checkups. But it did obviously need a couple of visits over those 20 years. One of which was...

Something major had clearly gone badly wrong. Only to be expected, after ten or so serviceless years. Did a bit of googling/asking around, like this, and called in the real McCoy. Worcestor Bosch man came to replace The Big Bit that had died. Very nice man. And when it came time to flash the cash he said that if it was him he would sign up for a year. It wouldn't cost much more than the cost for the one repair, and that was genuinely a good deal for a boiler of that age. Made perfect sense: where do I sign? Eight months later, dead boiler. Call WB. Return of Worcestor Bosch man. Same man, if I remember rightly. Very nice man. Who fixed the boiler again, taking away, again, a fair lump of expensive-looking innards. Told us a combi boiler is essentially two big lumps of kit sitting on top of each other, surrounded by bits. He'd replaced one on his previous visit; now he'd replaced t'other. "What you have there is not far off a new boiler." Which made perfect sense. And of course meant among other things that we had no need of an annual contract...

If i think back on our 25+ year old glow worm, the boiler itself had its fireproof lining sheet crack and collapse in its last 2 or 3 years, son ( gas engineer) sourced a generic fireproof sheet, cut to size, repair made. But thats it for the boiler itself
Servicing ?....not in the last 3 years or so, very sporadically otherwise, perhaps 10 services max in its life.
What normally kills them in the end is either the burner/ heat chamber or the heat exchanger failing, the two largest parts as you say.
The broken fireproof sheet failing would have probably condemned mine, availability of spares is the other key reason they get scrapped.

 

[gbb]

most new boilers will be gas /hydrogen mix ready i suspect, especially the bigger named manufacturers. Theres a lot of work being done by BG/Centrica ? with this in mind, many non compatible boilers will just require some modification to become useable.
All that if, if it (hydrogen mix) comes to fruition

 

[Gunk]

You might find that it’s a cheap easy fix, our Gloworm is now 37 years old and is still working perfectly, it’s a bit like triggers broom but I’m determined not to change it.