Kept thinking the house was a bit parky – the boiler seems dead. No lights, nothing.

What’s this homecare style insurance like? Worth it?

you’ve checked the fuses?

zed’s dead?

Checked the fuse box, there’s a cartridge fuse in the switch that I’ve not checked. Surely there’d be a fault tho if that were the case?

hopefully you’ll get a decent engineer to check it , we had several round over a 3 month period . replaced the printed cicuit board , thermistors and a couple of other bits with limited success . Eventually a guy came round and asked if anyone had checked the timer switch downstairs , it’s been fine ever since they replaced that.

i’ve got a GritishBas homecare 100 boiler maintenance contract, costs me £15 / month and i’ve found it very handy…

Don’t think you can take out the policy and then go “BTW my boiler is dead….” but would agree that the policy itself is good. I think you can ask for an emergency visit though at a fixed rate plus parts.

i sort of cheated – a little bit…

my boiler stopped working, i signed up for the homecare thing.

as part of the sign-up they sent a dude round to have a look at my boiler, he did that, and fixed it as well (very quickly).

How old is it? What type , make and model? Have you googled it to see if any common faults come up.
Worth finding a competant boiler engineer to come and have a look. Combi’s are relatively simple things. However the service parts are marked up hugely and it only takes a couple of call outs and diagnosis, followed by another visit to fit the widget before you are half way to a brand new boiler

There is a common fault with the controller board aparently, already had one under guarantee but it didn’t fail in the same way. Light was on, it just didn’t fire up.

This time it’s all dead.

3 year old boiler, dunno the make 🙂

If the fan shorts (i.e. ****) then it will blow the fuse on the board: pull off the fan wires from the control board, put new fuse in and see if it still blows.
£15 a month is all very fine except it adds up to £1800 over 10 years!!!

£15 a month is all very fine except it adds up to £1800 over 10 years!!!

Yeah, that’s how insurance works. They wouldn’t do it if they didn’t receive more money than they paid out!

I’ll get the multimeter out when I get home – problem is I am away all week, and Mrs Grips is at home with the wain getting cold.

its your board pal is it a ideal if so just ad same problem ?

All dead could be external controls / fuse causing the problem. Could be internal fuse causing it too, a lot of modern boilers have fuses fitted to the boards to try to protect them.
Not a Potterton is it?

Don’t think you can take out the policy and then go “BTW my boiler is dead….” but would agree that the policy itself is good. I think you can ask for an emergency visit though at a fixed rate plus parts.

might be worth a call – we had a broken drain and were able to get it surveyed and fixed if we signed up for a years insurance @£15 a month. Worked out a whole heap cheaper than the £400 odd we were quoted from a couple of independent firms…

£15 a month is all very fine except it adds up to £1800 over 10 years!!

My brother had to have his boiler replaced and wasn’t left with a great deal of change out of £3K…

My brother had to have his boiler replaced and wasn’t left with a great deal of change out of £3K…

WTF did he get for £3k? We recently had to replace ours and it was £1800 fitted for a Bosch inc. remote electronic climate control.

BTW – would HomeCare type insurance pay out for a new boiler or just parts??

no idea. All he said was that his heating had gone on the blink followed shortly afterwards by much groaning about the bills. He’s a building QS and savvy enough so I’d guess whatever he had done was reasonable and necessary…

(one of the reasons why we went with a wood-burner that drives our hot water and heating)

Got no idea what make it is unfortunately, and I’m not at home so I can’t check.

If a fuse has gone, would there not be some other fault causing this? As per the fan suggestion above?

molgrips, if your away all week I can come round an “service the old bolier” if need be, photos first please. 😈

bury it in the garden then plant a load of rose bushes on top of it, no one will ever know!

Lol 🙂 I’ll have to ask Mrs Grips about that.

£15 a month is all very fine except it adds up to £1800 over 10 years!!!

Yeah, that’s how insurance works. They wouldn’t do it if they didn’t receive more money than they paid out!

Funny, I thought insurance worked on economies of scale, i.e. having lots of policy holders with premiums and based on an average of the percentage who might need to claim, cost per claim etc.

£15 is too much and i would not recommend this. I would use a local central heating engineer myself. British Gas are very expensive! I got them to quot my mother for a replacement boiler. They came up with £4.5K for an £800 boiler and a day’s work for two men!?

If there is no life whatsoever, check the main fuse in the spur to which the boiler is attached.

I would class a 3 year old boiler as virtually new, so replacing it would be madness unless it had suffered a catastrophic failure.

having lots of policy holders with premiums and based on an average of the percentage who might need to claim, cost per claim etc.

Yeah and their premiums! It depends on the thing being insured. It’s a safe bet that every policy holder is going to need a new boiler eventually, so you need to recoup that cost eventually.

It’s more like assurance than insurance in that respect 🙂

When our boiler died recently, we got British Gas to come out and repair it on their fixed price repair scheme. £167 to fix, including parts and labour seemed a decent price to me, particularly as he had to replace the PCB which was at least £200 ex VAT on it’s own. The service we received was absolutely first class, they came on time, explained everything and left no mess at all. Highly recommended.

Ideal Icos HE12.

The unit has power – it clicks when the heating is turned on or off via the timer, and the switch makes a sparky type noise when you turn it on or off.

Can’t see a fuse anywhere inside the thing although I haven’t dismantled much of it, naturally.

Googling for faults now.

Oh right.. seems like we have the most unreliable boiler in the world. Fab.

WTF did he get for £3k? We recently had to replace ours and it was £1800 fitted for a Bosch inc. remote electronic climate control.

Just had a glowworm fitted for 1300 quid with remote thermostat

£160 for a controller at Central Heating Supplies in Cardiff this morning – fixed.

Except this morning it was leaking from some kind of pressure valve. It’s a chunky brass cylinder ont he end of a pipe, pointing upwards, with a red thing on the end the size of a schraeder valve cap. You can unscrew it and it’s a small plastic screw with a little o-ring on it. It was loose, and this is where it was leaking from. I tightened it up, and it seems to have stopped. It’s got “10 bar” written on the side. Wtf is it? Some kind of emergency blow-out thing?

Additionally, I discovered (after being out all day with the system off) that the pressure was down to 0 (it’s an unvented pressurised system). I put it back up, but seems weird. Only a teaspoon of brown water had dripped out.

yon thing is just an air bleed vent (highest point of the boiler; lets air trapped in the boiler out). cap should be loose to let air escape.
Loosing pressure: Check no water dripping out of the blow-off pipe to the outside. Sometimes the pressure release valves don’t seat if they have been opened (cone shaped knurled red plastic thingmy).

It’s not at the highest point though… And water was coming out of it not air.

Water is dripping through the thing that lets you see the drips, or at least it was an hour ago.

’tis an auto bleed valve. Should just bleed the air from the boiler but sometimes they go wrong 🙁 can be replaced easily by isolating the boiler using the valves underneath it. Costs about £6 from the merchants.

If you find that the pressure drops very easily and it’s not venting/leaking somewhere check that the pressure vessel hasn’t filled with water.
Used a trackpump to fill it with air and hey presto, pressure stayed up perfectly. As to how the water got there in the first place???

Ok 🙂 I will try that. The red thing should be loose?

The pressure vessel? The watermelon sized globe above the cylinder? There are two.

I hadn’t checked the pressure for ages, but hadn’t seemed to be a problem. Today however it was zero – although only a few drops had leaked out.