one for the boiler men

[Mr Macaw]

So you mean the greenies sometimes win over the safety brigade?

The flame is quite blue, which means it's good. If I got a lot of red, I'd clean it.

So if someone stood in my driveway inhaling the gases from the flu, they might get poisoned. Er.... I won't bother.

My flu is outside the house for some reason. Brilliant idea that was.

So why did you choose it?

I thought condensing boilers worked best at higher temperatures? I'm sure I remember someone in here saying they aren't efficient while warming up for example.

[Tony Bryer]

The two I installed in my [then] church back in 2001 are AFAIK still going. The one I installed for my mother was scrapped soon after I emigrated - prior to that it needed an expensive just out of warranty heat exchanger replacement.

In fairness to Keston, they were aware of the issues on the early builds and ran an annual service offer for something like £80 inc parts and if you took it up various parts like the duct hose and PCBs were upgraded at the same time.

The boiler that really caused me grief was my Potterton Envoy.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Flue duct is on its MkIII design (last time I bought one). My boiler came with the MkII design originally. The MkI alledgely had a very short life.

I can see one bug in the firmware from its behaviour, and there are also some efficiency improvements which could be programmed into it. I do have a spare control board now from a scrapped C25 which might have newer firmware, but I haven't tried swapping them over.

Of the boilers I service around the family, we've had a Potteron Suprima with the usual failed circuit board (not enough solder, and failed caps). Did an exchange with Geoff. Also, a friend with a Potterton Baxi 80 combi has a burned out gas valve, which happened when it was used for too long with a scaled up heat exchanger causing the gas to repeatedly cycle on and off which may have contributed.

Only other failure in last several years was a leaking 3-way valve which showed up as a fuse blowing.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Yup. My brother had one - recommended, supplied and fitted by BG. Broke down at least twice a year, and was replaced long before its claimed service life.

We worked out that the cost of doing this far exceeded the gas saving cost over the previous BE RS Vulcan, which was still working, but BG sort of insisted must be changed.