Anyone have experience with Ideal boilers?

Need a new combi boiler.
Plumber is quoting for an Ideal Esprit Eco 24kw.

Heard a few people talking about Worcester Bosch too, but looks like they are about £800 as opposed to £500 for the Ideal.

Plumber says he’s fitted loads of the Ideals with no hassle.

We’ve had a new one 12 months ago
Had the engineers back to it 3 times, for faulty valves
The guy that came to service it last week said they were unreliable, but I’ve got a 5 year warranty, so not too mithered

Our 10 year old Ideal Isar (base model, fitted by developers) is a piece of crap – PCB’s are useless and we are on our 4th one

Our non combi ran for 15 years before becoming uneconomical to repair. Has been replaced with updated version of the same. Other makers were a lot more expensive and consensus of 3 different plumbers over lifetime of process was that for what we wanted ideal are good no nonsense kit and increased pricetag doesn’t come with any guarantee of increased life expectancy.

Glad we’re not the only ones who got a crap Ideal ISAR….every time British Gas come to repair it they tell us how crap it is….ironic, since the supplied and fitted it!

Friend of mine was a Ideal service/breakdown engineer but left after 3 months as he said it was embarrassing having to keep going back to the same customers over and over again. I’ve fitted maybe 200 boilers over the last 10 years and only fitted 2 ideals out of that. Had problems with both of them. I suggest a Glow Worm as a good mid range boiler.

We had an Ideal Logic 35 (recommended by the 3 local plumber/gas fitters we asked) fitted just over a year ago.

Haven’t had any issues with it.

My mate fits these every time now. He used to fit Glowworm, but had a lot of problems with faults on them.
They are not to be confused with the poor quality Isar/Icon range of 10 years ago.

Dead simple inside, a doddle to install electrically.

We had an Ideal Logic 35 (recommended by the 3 local plumber/gas fitters we asked) fitted just over a year ago.

Haven’t had any issues with it.

+1 (more like 18 months ago now. and, as said above, 5 year warranty just in case but not needed it so far)

We have had our Ideal independent + c35 for 18 months now and it has been superb,it runs the house central heating and the underfloor heating with no problems at all.

Logic Ideal+ here. Very impressed, seems to maintain a temperature better than the WB in this place. Filler loop seized, one phone call, known problem, replaced under warranty within a few hours. Faultless since.

7 year warranty too!

Had the British Gas guy round fixing a 8 year old Isar 35 today. Known as unreliable, the upside is that boiler repairmen will always have spares in the van!

We’ve got an ideal boiler, it was put in just before we bought. We’ve had it repaired under warranty once (so when less than 2 years old). We’ll be replacing it shortly (now 4 years old) as the one we’ve got isn’t really up to running a shower from.

Ideal have a bit of a stigma from the Isaf which was to be fair a crap boiler which was put on the market with no testing done and it only really existed for the Defra Warmfront scheme, the Icos (heat only version) was just as bad.

The Logic is a much better boiler, there was a few issues with the earlier models but they got sorted pretty quickly. You’ll get a 7 year warranty on it which is pretty much standard on most new boilers. The Esprit is a rebadged version of the Logic but with a shorter warranty (2yr I think) but it’s the same as a lot of rebadged ones like the I-mini/ProCombi/Independent C.

So, I’m getting the consensus that:
Old Ideal boilers: crap
New Ideal boilers: just as good as anyone else’s.

I inherited a 12 year old Ideal Isar that is on its original PCB – apparently the originals were orange so that’s how the plumber knew.
He said they were pretty rubbish but if it’s a worker then stick with it.
He said PCBs can fail straight out of the box and once had to fit 3 before one worked, which then failed inside a week!
I’d be tempted to avoid if getting a new one, but you could be lucky…

yourguitarhero – Member
So, I’m getting the consensus that:
Old Ideal boilers: crap
New Ideal boilers: just as good as anyone else’s.

Our Ideal Elan boiler is 23 years old and still going strong <famous last words>. But you can’t use that to compare against modern ones as they are all condensing now.