Son currently rents a flat. The electric boiler has packed in. Can’t get hold of the landlord and gets an out of office message from agency with no emergency number.
I’ve never rented so cannot advise. Can he call out an emergency boiler engineer and reclaim the cost from the landlord?
Cheers

What does it say in his contract?

Mrs TJ says no legal right to do so. However she says the landlord would be liable for compensation so unless the landlord is really awkward then go ahead and do it as the landlord should agree to pay the heating engineer to avoid having to pay compensation.

So for me it really depends on how much the bill is likely to be and how reasonable the landlord is

From my understanding he has a right to heat and hot water, but would expect to make reasonable efforts to contact landlord or agent first which he’s done by the sounds of it.

However, personally, and currently renting in UK, for the sake of waiting until monday I wouldn’t call out an emergency plumber unless I was willing to pick up the bill, as Landlord may be an ar5e and argue it.

On the other hand as a lanlord of our home in USA I would think this entirely reasonable for him to do assuming he has done basic things like checked fuse and tried resetting.

Sounds like my understanding is wrong, defer to Mrs TJ

Good point tho -has he done some basic checks? Ie any fault codes on the boiler, if its a combi is there enough pressure?

When did the boiler stopped working?

If just now, wait till Monday.

Electric boiler for heating?
Or
Electric boiler for hot water?

I’m not sure it makes a huge difference. Your son isn’t authorised to allow work on the flat – what if he calls the dodgy firm who claim ‘it is just. £4k for a new one’ – only for landlord to tell you he already had a spare boiler and his plumber would do it for £500. Who pays the difference?

Tell him to go around to a pals for shower and warmth.

My boiler packed in suddenly this January. It took a day for emergency plumber (it was in the cold spell) and a further 5 days over weekend to get new boiler fitted. Out of niceness I refunded the weeks rent.

Landlord here…3 days with no hot water is ok, any more starts getting into compensation territory. Unless he has done something stupid.

Tenants in private rentals dont get hotel like service levels.

Whover calls the plumber pays so as a tenant I would not.

Cheers for the responses. It’s just hot water so at least he’s not freezing.
Landlord is a bit of a pain so probably best not to present him with a large bill.

I tend to agree with others above. My rule of thumb is to do for the tenant what I would do for my own house, so if my regular plumber says he can’t be there for a couple of days, we wait, rather than doing an emergency callout to an unknown tradesman. I do have a box of fan and convector heaters ready to go for a winter boiler failure though, and electric showers as backup to hot water.

Professional Landlord here. Even if tenant called his own plumber most won’t answer out of working hours and don’t do ’emergency’ call outs. They say there are only two plumbing emergencies anyway:
1) Gas leak – not a plumbers problem call Transco.
2) Water leak – turn off stopcock.

However I don’t quite agree with plumbers. Surprise surprise..

LL sounds like a tit though, we have a 24 hr ’emergency’ number for our tenants because if there is water pissing out of something we can at least go and turn it off as not all tenants have the knowledge of what some of us consider basics. You need to protect your asset. Also if a pressurised water system is leaking turning off stopcock won’t help until it empties itself out. For example I saved a nice engineered oak floor last year by putting a hose on the radiator system drain down to empty it while bastard radiator valve had cracked.
Tenants expectation should be same as any residential person – LL calls plumber first thing monday, he comes to you as soon as possible, but it might not be until weds thurs. Even then if parts are needed it might take a few more days. That’s the same experience any of us would have. Landlords don’t have magic plumbers.
This is why we remind tenants to tell us problems ASAP, however minor. Our staff are trained to thank them for their reports even if it seems stupid/petty, as we want to encourage them to report early, plus what they think is minor might be symptoms of something bigger. It protects the asset, and maintaining a good relationship with tenant pays dividends.

I think 5plus8 probably has the right answer there. In my answer above I thought it included heating. Just loss of hot water is not as serious.

TBH, mine would be the same even if it included heating, other than providing alternate temp heating sources. You can’t magic up a plumber with availability and all the parts overnight.
As long as the landlord acts reasonably and does what he can, then its fair. If it was your house and you employed the plumber you would have the same problems. Paying rent doesn’t give special rights to draw from some imaginary pool of specially employed idle plumbers that are waiting for just this emergency.
Although as an aside – we replace boilers as parts become scarce for precisely this reason, I don’t want to have a tenant wait 14 days for parts.There is also the issue of pre and post winter servicing and testing to make sure its all running nice and we don’t have pissed of clients.

5plus8. I no longer have this but I used to have a system where I would get an engineer withing 24 hrs for my boiler and it would be repaired on the first visit.

Since I fitted a new boiler from a different manufacturer I no longer have access to this service from the manufacturer

Ah yes thats on brand new boilers, its warranty work – I can’t renew boilers every 24 months. But we also take advantage of this when we replace a boiler, Worcester Bosch techs are very good, have loads of parts. We won’t buy anything else.
You can buy extended warranties, but my experience of them is less satisfactory, plus it only applies to the boiler, other plumbing systems in the house can fail too.

Since I fitted a new boiler from a different manufacturer I no longer have access to this service from the manufacturer

[Angelisarvensismode] don’t you ever learn from your own experience?? [/Angelisarvensismode]

No it was a 20 year old bosch. their tech service was great. Only once when it failed did I have to wait 48 hrs for repair. Now I have a brand new Valient. I also have a tame gas engineer / plumber but using him may mean a wait for parts.

Hmm I have never come across this. I did call bosch once on an old boiler and they would not come unless I back paid the ext warranty to cover the empty 6 years, it was a property we had just taken over. So I just sent my gas engineer.
TBH now you have raised it, I’m reminded that I need to look again because one of our gas engineers was talking about this recently and how even he was using ext warranty on his boiler at home. Skeptikal I am, but I will do the maths.

PS check your messages.

BOsch run a fixed price repair system ( or used to). You phone the head office, pay them a fixed fee and the next day ( most of the time) one of their guys comes round and fixes the boiler there and then because they have all the parts for your boiler in the van

Its a bit of a gamble because its a couple of hundred pounds so if it an easy repair then you lose out.

When 8-5 mon to fri plumbers invoice an hourly rate and mileage – simple fixes we often only get charged 15mins . We can sometimes fix over the phone.

Anyway, this is all hypothetical, we have 5 plumbers working for us most weeks and its been a long time since any of my clients have waited longer than a day for the first visit.
However it is important for tenants to know what to expect – the courts would look quite poorly on any tenant claim for disrepair if the landlord could prove:
1) LL called plumber asap. (monday)
2) Plumber came at first opp (3 days lets say)
3) Unfortunately parts out of stock so 48 hr wait
4) Plumber fixed first thing next Monday.
5) LL shows boiler had service within last 12 months