my daughters got a problem with the hot water in her house and thinks its a boiler problem. she cant get hold of a plumber for advice, so…… “ask on your bike website please dad” 😀

its an alpha combi boiler located downstairs. if she wants a sinkful of water downstairs, she has to run the taps for about 10 mins before enough hot water comes out to fill the sink. once the tap is switched off, its cold again when she switches it on a couple of hours later.

upstairs if she tries to run a bath its stone cold, but after a couple of minutes some lukewarm water comes through, but once she puts the plug in to start it, it goes cold again. just seems to be the odd burst of warm water, never hot, but goes cold nearly straight away.

any suggestions please? boiler? thermostat?

thanks a lot

If it’s not firing could be thermostat or flow sensor.

Blocked plate/main heat exchanger ,thermostat/thermistor fault,diverter valve passing,gas valve running on low stage ,shower valve passing , oh and its a an alpha boiler !! the list is endless ,call a gas safe engineer

yeah, think shes resigned herself to the fact that she’ll need one, just wondered if it was something obvious that she could tell them.

from that list above, obviously not 😀

thanks

My top tip: ring British Gas they’ll do a fixed price one off repair, no obligation to take out cover. I followed this advice given to me by my mate who’s a plumber, not for British Gas! It worked out cheaper than just the new part would’ve been if my mate had bought it, let alone labour costs.

headfirst could have some good advice there with there fixed rate fee.

Does the central heating work? If so then it’s possible the hot water flow sensor has been contaminated / broken. – We’ve just played this game 🙁

Definitely needs someone qualified to look at it

Hmm the British Gas fixed-price repair thing looks interesting and the T&Cs seem OK to. Only thing is though could they condemn the boiler and disconnect it and leave me screwed? OK if it’s about to blow up then disconnecting it gets my vote but I saw on one TV programme they routinely condemned boilers over 15 years old even if there wasn’t an obvious fault. There’s nothing I know that’s wrong with my boiler but wouldn’t mind it getting checked out (it’s around 20 years old)…

Fuzzy

Call me a cynic but don’t be surprised if the BG engineer condemned your boiler and said you HAVE to have a new one. – How else do you suppose they fund the insurance policies?

Yeah that’s what I’m worried about 🙁

Ah, 20 year old boiler would be in all probability condemned by them, and you may find that the cost of repair is not worth it on such and aged appliance.

I’ve used the BG fixed fee repair service and it was excellent. Engineers were spot on, no attempt to condemn the old boiler and they explained everything they were doing and it was fixed (new PCB) quickly.

By comparison, the Alpha engineers who fixed our brand new Alpha boiler had to come back 3 times before the issue was resolved (new PCB, on a month old boiler!). They were quick to come out though, can’t fault the response time.

OP – we had similar symptoms, the hot water wouldn’t heat but we did have heating most of the time. The fault was the PCB, though they replaced the gas valve and something else before coming to that conclusion. It’s been spot on since.

Me again, to clarify:

IIRC, the one-off fee is £99, but if the job is going to take more than half an hour – and they’ll tell you this when they come out and have a look – this goes up to £169 for up to 2hrs.

What I did, and wanted to do anyway as my faith had run out in my plumbing mate, was get it fixed and then have it covered as well, through a monthly payment. This cost me £99 for getting the boiler going again, and then £20 a month to cover the boiler and the whole CH system, including an annual service.

Getting the boiler fixed actually involved three visits: one to diagnose the problem and order the part on a Friday, a second to fit it on the Monday, and un-do all the mess my ‘mate’ had made – the engineer was here for about 3 hours – and then a third visit a few days later when it started acting up again, they came the same day I called. This was a 5 minute job to push up some plastic sleeving that had dropped out of place. I dread to think what all of that would have cost me just getting a plumber out. The engineer told me the main part replaced cost over £150 trade price.

So yeah, a big thumbs up for BG here!

EDIT: just seen the 20 yr old bit – think you might be stuffed there! Still worth giving them a ring, tell them it’s 20 yrs old, see what they say.