I am looking at a replacement boiler and controls and had centred my attentions around the Worcester-Bosch 24Ri. A discussion with a local potential installer last night concerned me somewhat. Yes, I know this is one man's experience and that he may have other agendas (discounts for volume etc). However, he was claiming a failure rate of 2 out of 11 WB units.
Just thought I'd ask the question.
Has anyone here had experience of a sudden (last 6 months) decline in WB support for guarantee work? The installer in question is proposing Alpha boilers which ISTR have a fair following within this group.
I know a guy who manages a council team of tradesmen for council properties. They don't touch WB because of poor support. This is much longer than 6 months, more like 6 years.
We have a 28SiII installed in March 2004 - from new the PCB was faulty,=20 but was replaced very efficiently by WB the day after we rang.
Earlier this year it keeled over completely - it had been flaky mid Dec=20
2005, but not completely dead... A call-out was made at (IIRC) =A3180=20 during which (google will give the correct order if I mess them up here)=20 the fan unit, air pressure sensor and PCB were replaced.
It worked for a couple of days then went ape again. A follow-up call was=20 made (they have a 30-day "we'll come back out and fix the problem we=20 didn't solve" "free" return), during which the PCB and transformer were=20 replaced.
From what I gather from their engineer while he was onsite, WB (and=20 other manufacturers) now purposely create expensive problems by using=20 the PCB as the protective device (rather than a simple fuse) - so if=20 anything else in the boiler fails, the board also needs replacing at=20 considerable cost to the consumer.
This, to my mind, is bordering on criminal negligence, but hey, i`m not=20 the one raking in the money...
Following a couple of emails to their support, it was intimated that=20 needing 2 boards in less than two years was not an unusual / ongoing=20 problem - at which point I asked for specific failure rates of the=20 components they had had to replace, as it seemed piss poor to me.
I was not given an answer to the failure rates, but was bounced up the=20 chain to someone who offered to convert the call-out payment I had made=20 into a one year repair and maintenance contract.
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