How does geof know what the failure rate is? He doesn't know how many boilers are installed, just how many he gets orders for. He may get 10 bad boilers where only 100 are installed and get 1000 better boilers where 1 million are fitted. His figures would show the opposite of what is actually true.
At best he could comment on the observed quality of the PCBs but not on the fault rate unless he gets a lot of returns for his own stuff where he knows the quantity installed.
Modern Vaillants are good (though after two troublesome combis, the first a Vaillant) I just changed to a Vaillant system.
Yes, a C25. He installed his about the same time I did mine, although we didn't know this until afterwards. I got the full details from Keston of how to set the gas mixture, and I gave them to him. (The instructions in the manual are no good.) Although the gas mixture was supposed to be factory set, we all found it was miles out when we installed ours, so far out the burner wouldn't work properly and the thing made a sound like a 32' organ pipe.
Yes, that was several years back.
The Celsius 25 was their first domestic sized condensing boiler. (They had done condensing boilers for some years, but only large industrial ones.) The Celsius 25 design came from a hugarian company they took over, IIRC. It was one of the few in UK which had a stainless steel heat exchanger at the time. Other domestic ones in the UK at the time were mostly aluminium heat exchangers which quickly corroded, or convention boilers with later design mods to add a secondary condensing heat exchanger, which could not operate as flexibly, and turned out to be very unreliable and vanished from the market quite quickly.
The Keston was relatively simple, designed as a condenser from the outset, and quite cheap. There were a number of design issues, none major, and Keston did fix them through the sales life of the boiler.
The Eco-Hometec (?) appeared afterwards, which Andy Hall fitted. This was a more complex boiler capable of more automation, but it cost 3 times as much. I might have gone for it if it had been around a year earlier.
Overrated.
Now garbage.
Viessman is good, Keston is now not much better than scrap metal. The best is ATAG. The ATAG EC325C has an integrated gassaver and weather compensation.
There are two still running in my old church in Twickenham, now into their 11th winter and running fine AFAIK. The first few years were problematic, but in fairness to Keston they did design out some of the teething problems.
Last time I checked, Eco Hometec (as they were branded here) no longer had a presence in the UK. I looked at them for my system and the design/support was excellent but the value added features all came at a substantial extra cost so it priced itself out of the market. The tuning software was of particular interest but IIRC it was targeted at installers so it was in the hundreds ballpark.
In the end I went with a Keston C25 as the unique features were needed for my install and it is still going strong. That may be in part due to my re-calibration of the input rate at install time, it was miles out when shipped from the factory and the resulting mixture problems could have screwed it in short order. No other major problems.
Romanian I think. My recollection is that the heat exchanger is a an alloy lump with end plates bolted on (like a car cylinder head), gaskets a potential weakness.
I thought it was one of yours which burned out its heat exchanger, burning the cabinet case? Maybe it was someone else's?
That reminds me, I had a slight weep recently (approx 8yrs in) from the joint with the end castings (they have waterways so are a little more than simple plates) but a tighten up of all the end screws sorted it out. They all needed about a quarter turn or so.
Ah, probably was Romanian.
Mine's made of thick welded stainless steel sheet and stainless steel tubing - AFAIK, they all were. I can well imagine it's a very expensive part to make, and probably most of the boiler's
43kg weight (there isn't a lot else in it - the grundfoss pump and mains transformer would be the only other parts weighing anything much). As a replacement part, it costs the same as the whole boiler did originally.The bolted on end plates look like an alloy, but they just loop back the internal corrigated stainless steel tubes, and have no contact with the inside of the heat exchanger or condensate. They are only exposed to the central heating water. I haven't heard of any failures or leaks with these end plates.
The burner gasket is a bit of a pain, as it cracks into about
20 pieces the first time you fire up the boiler, which doesn't matter except it means you have to replace it every time you take the burner off for servicing. I eventually stopped taking the burner off when servicing, because there was never any dirt to be cleaned out, so it was doing more harm than good. I assume that if anything deteriorates there, I'll see deterioration in the flue gas analysis, but I never have. The only other thing to check is the thermal insulation inside the heat exchanger which does deteriorate, but as it's not replaceable (it's put in before welding together), there's not much point in checking it as there's nothing you can do about it.
Is it true that the Keston is a fairly noisy boiler? In my primary school they have a Keston 170 which you could hear all over the school when it was running, a loud whistling sound. AFAIK it is still in operation, installed around 2001.
In message , Mike Harrison writes
Any boiler with an ISAR / ICOS pcb in should be avoided at all costs
I got through over 1000 ICOS transformers last year
The expected lifetime of the average condensing boiler is IIRC 5-7 years ATM, so don't expect reliability on any front
There is the option of using a bit of reverse logic here, as some of the less reputable manufacturers are having to offer extended warranties, so there is the argument that you are better off going for a less desirable make which gives you the peace of mind of X years suppport
One of the many holes in the drivel argument is that some of his "preferred" boilers are not well known and spares are not so easily available. Also some fitters don't want to touch them as they don't understand them
I shall file that for future reference, I might even post that on the door at work
(ties in with an anecdote from yesterday, but it's a bit late to expand on now)
Mine isn't noisy. It's in the bathroom, and you can't hear it at all if the shower or wall fan heater are on. You can hear it if there's no other noise when it's modulated above about
30%. At low modulation, you would have to be quite close to hear it.However, your 170 is one of their commercial boilers, not intended for domestic use, and a quite different design.
In message , Andrew Gabriel writes
Have you seen the price of their fans?
The motors on their old fans came from bulgaria
BIASI still seem to be punting designs like that... Still for the price I suppose you can buy a couple and keep a spare!
In message , "dennis@home" writes
You're actually more or less right for a change denboi
What you've typed above is not far off what I tell anyone who asks what I recommend
It's not "my own stuff" dennis, we're repairing badly designed pcbs from the manufacturers - we don't modify them
For example, I occasionally get Suprima pcbs which develop faults within the warranty period - thats life, its a Suprima pcb - you can't, as they say, polish a turd
considering that we turned over a bit over £8000 in the past two days, there are bound to be a few where other faults develop
In hard numbers, he probably does not - at lease not in all cases. However he does get to talk to lots of installers and repairers and hence that is quite a reasonable way of forming a more balanced picture of what models are causing problems, what models are being recommended and fitted etc than is available to you or I.
In some cases where a customer is a local authority or housing association, and they tell you they have fitted 5000 of model X in the last three years, then you get a very good feel for a *subset* of the failure rate (i.e. that attributable to the subsystems you specialise in)
You can also draw conclusions from comparing returns on one model with a previous / successor. If a new one comes out, and six months later you find you are getting far more of those to fix than the repair rate for the previous model which had been on the market unchanged for five years, you get a good indication there is a problem with the replacement etc.
Given there is no central database one can go an inspect with hard data, its better than pure guess work.
If you ask your favoured installer, they will probably only recommend from the small handful of models they routinely fit - and quite often that is more down to brand loyalty and how easy they are to install than being based on objective reliability observations.
Got any better suggestions?
Funny, a few moments ago it was intergas...
And what do you base your recommendation on dribble?
Well, if he describes a 2 stroke oil burning engine as non-polluting what do you expect?
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