A letting agent is looking for support to lobby the Government to make boiler manufacturers give ten-year warranties.
Anthony Kerrigan, of Kerrigans in Doncaster, said: “That would make manufacturers think twice about selling unreliable rubbish. We are all being ripped off.”
He said that for many years, as letting agents, he had been advising – correctly, as he had thought – clients to replace old back boilers with modern combi and condensing models.
He said: “This is now haunting us. They are unreliable and too expensive to fix.”
He went on: “The average repair cost of an old back boiler was £30, which was normally a call-out charge and a replacement thermo-couple, approximately once every five years if the boiler was serviced. The boiler pretty well lasted forever, because there is nothing in them except a heat exchanger.
“The average repair cost of a new boiler is £250 for a new printed circuit board approximately every three years. The plumbers boast that a modern boiler has a life expectancy of eight years, but I think it is closer to six.”
He said most modern boilers have warranties of one or two years, and said most had been built to be deliberately fragile. A circuit board with a retail price of £150 probably costs just pennies to make, he added.
Any thoughts on this? Please post below.
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Comments
I swear by "Vaillant" - much the best in terms of modern combi-boilers as far as I'm concerned...
Totally agree, Combis are way to complex for the rental sector and are not very good for much else either. Interesting that on talking to Persimmon's Site Agent on the estate where my rental property is, he said that they had abandoned combis as they caused more call backs to their new houses than any other problem.
I don't work for them but if you really must have a combi Worcester Bosch is about the most reliable, back in the day when I was plumbing for a living, Worcesters were more reliable by a country mile, not cheap to buy, but who needs phone calls from an irate tenant at 11pm on a Sunday night.
Agree that boiler manufacturers make Combis susceptible to breakdown, with many parts that can go wrong. The old cast iron Pottertons ie Maxi were great, but since then the smaller sized Suprima have been plagued with PCB faults due to bad design. I understand that the wiring is too close to the heat exchanger and heats up.
A 10 yr guarantee should be the norm, it's more than a nuisance for both tenants and landlords to have boiler failures in the coldest months, a time when they are needed the most.
The German and Dutch boilers sell on reliability, they are used to heating multiple dwellings, even a street at a time.
I totally agree and it is not just landlords who are being ripped off. I had an old boiler when I moved into my home that had been put in when the house was built. It lasted over 25 years with never a days trouble and a total lack of servicing! When it failed we replaced it with a "more efficient" combi boiler and every year for the last 6 years it has broken down for sometimes several weeks in Decemeber/January. It has been rebuilt so many times that the only original bit is the casing! Fortunately we took out cover on it when it was put in and we have kept it up because we wouldn't dare not do so! The most recent engineer asked me why I was so suprised - the boiler was over 5 years old after all and that was pretty much the lifespan expected. As a result I am nursing all the old boilers in my rental properties (including back boilers) in an effort to avoid having to replace them with kit which seems designed to fail.
I had a new Potterton combi boiler installed in one of my houses about 10 years ago. It has failed 6 or 7 times since then, twice with the wax valve, and twice with the main PCB. Next door, there is a conventional balanced flue boiler, maybe 20-25 years old, that has never failed. This experience colours my outlook on new hi-tech boilers somewhat.
Understand the concerns here, after living with a poor heating system in a rented new build flat for past 6 years.
However. When upgrading a heating system from back boiler to combi boiler -just replacing the boiler may be the false economy as old radiators can be sludged and caused early break down of the newly installed boiler.
I know landlords don't like to pay high maintenance costs , but a little more spent at initial installation may help in the long term.