My mate has just had a plumber to resolve poor performance of his heating. He turned up at 15:00 with a new pump. He found the gate valves were siezed so he drained the system. He fitted the new pump without replacing the gate valves Short sighted or what? The system is no better.
To use electricians as an comparison, a fitter can go along to a standard house and install two standard rings, two standard lights, a standard cooker, with 1.5, 2.5 and 4 mil with the standard fuses in the CU. An engineer can go along to a non-standard building and measure and calculate that this cable needs to be 16mm and protected by this breaker, and this circuit is so far away it needs to be 10mm and that can't be a spur, and that installation method X must be used, etc, optionally instructing fitters to do the actual fitting.
jgh
On Tuesday 18 February 2014 19:21 DerbyBorn wrote in uk.d-i-y:
And he didn't have a portable pipe freezer rig?
Because it is better than not training and living on benefits? Pick the right trade and there will always be work. Train to fit solar panels, OTOH....
Spoken from the heart! :-)
I can agree with that
But not that. A heating engineer might be designing the system to feed a shopping mall, or designing new boilers. The guy who fixes my house boiler? Nope.
Andy
GEC Software Engineer?
Did you by any chance work at any time on System X?
Although ISTR it was mainly Plessey that did that.
Cheers
Dave R
No, this was GEC Sensors "Electro Optical Surveillance Division" - avionics, thermal imaging etc.
I recall working with one Scottish engineer who was desperate to get out of the GEC empire, and also get a job closer to home. He was well chuffed when he landed a job at Plessey in Scotland. I presume somewhat less chuffed when they acquired them a few months later!
Don't discount the possibility that your plumber is also an engineer... e.g. our own John S.
The important thing will be to have the education to understand the field you go into, and to continue to develop as it changes. That's rather different from many of today's apprentices who learn by rote, but don't actually understand how things work or why they are taught to do things the way they are. I think those roles will dwindlw.
Having the educational backing also means you can relatively easily change field as one field dies and another emerges - the really important thing it gives you is learning how to learn, and I think the number of jobs which don't require continuous learning/development over the next decades will very rapidly shrink, as it has been for many decades already, but even more so.
I caught the tail-end of something on the radio a few days ago which was pointing out that you need to be educated to degree level in Germany to become a chimney sweep, because you are expected to have a very detailed understanding of all the appliances, the physics behind how they operate, building construction, etc, before you can be suitably qualified.
That's a risk, but the job still involves fitting hardware in the UK so you can be confident you won't be replaced by a machine, nor can the work be d one for a pittance by bright young men in Mumbai and e-mailed to the custom er.
A relative is in the final stages of a plumbing apprenticeship. A large p ortion of the work involves rectifying the work of various East Europeans ' plumbers' who, the customer had thought, had done the work for a bargain pr ice. For example, 'bargain' East European plasterers worked in a rented fla t; some time later, it was found they'd stolen all the copper heating pipew ork from under the first floor.
There are competent & honest East Europeans, but it takes time for them t o acquire a good reputation, like any other Uk-born plumber.
I agree completely. But I suspect that plumbing is a more stable trade than most because the basic requirements, components, materials, and jointing methods are not going to change all that much in the next 50 years. OK we will have better plastics, and might start using electrically heated instead of solvent weld on domestic as well as "distribution" pipework. We'll probably have more heat pumps too (but refrigeration/air con is already one specialist sub-set of plumbing). While boilers and their control systems will undoubtedly get more complicated, there will be "wizards" for setting them up, and self-diagnosis routines should also get very much better.
If I could find a well-constructed boiler with sound and confidence- inspiring mechanical components, I'd be sorely tempted to rip out all the crappy, poor quality Chinese electrics/electronics control circuits you typically find and replace them all with my own bespoke systems, properly designed from scratch. Absolutely no mains voltage control signals for a start! Does anyone know of a manufacturer whose new boilers are properly engineered for a long and reliable life (apart from the inevitable crap electrics, of course)?
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