So much for getting a pro in

[John Rumm]

You have to wonder sometimes!

Son wanted Dad's taxi to take him back to uni the other day. When we got there I commented that it was a bit chilly in the house. He said, yes the heating was not working so the landlord had sent a "heating engineer" to fix it. They diagnosed a problem with the thermostat, and fitted a new Salus wireless programmable stat as a replacement, but it was still not working.

So I had a look a the stat, seemed to be mostly setup ok aside from displaying the wrong day of the week.

So had a look at the boiler end of it, and that was switched to "manual" on the receiver. So flipped it to auto, and hit the manual override button on the wireless stat, and the first problem became obvious - the wired and wireless bits were not actually paired.

So after a bit of RTFM, I managed to find the magic sequence of power on/off and button hold down sequences to get them paired. Yahoo, now at least the green light on the receiver would light in sympathy with the stat coming "on".

That then left the problem that the boiler was still not firing. The combi boiler itself seemed to be working, and doing DHW ok. Just no CH. So I pondered for a bit wondering if it was possible that they had not wired the receiver correctly? The wires at least looked like they were heading in the right direction and the stats receiver was being powered from the boiler ok. Then I thought to open the front panel flap on the boiler and found a mechanical rotary time switch, set to timed mode, but with all the timing pips in the "off" position. So I flipped that to "always" on, and it all started working as it should. (I had to explain to the local audience that "always on" did not mean massive gas bills - just that the stat was programmable for time and temperature and made the time in the boiler redundant!)

Finally took the liberty of setting the stat to the right day so they did not get their longer warmer weekend temperature setup on Wednesday and Thursday when they were all out at lectures.

I have a suspicion that the heating engineer found it did not respond to the wired stat that was there, and assumed the stat was the problem rather than the internal timer. He probably changed it, found it still did not fix it, then did a runner! (or took one look at the process of pairing them and thought sod that).

[Theo]

IMX a typical MO is the tenant complains of an issue, the letting agent calls up their tame firm, the technician attends, <does stuff>, sends in the bill, letting agent sends it to the landlord to pay.

Nobody bothers to ask the tenant whether it did actually fix the problem! It depends on the tenant making a further complaint, but the letting agent isn't bothered because the landlord foots the bill.

Some of the better agents have 'case tracking' systems where this can be managed, but others it's just a case of phoning Dave in the office who may or may not remember to phone the plumber in the morning.

Theo

[Davey]

I lived in a rented house in the US once that had a water softener that regenerated itself based on a timer. The timer had different day options, so you could set the timer for, say, 2 am on a weekend. But there were six different days. I always wondered where you could find a six-day week.

[Brian Gaff]

However, it often seems to me that half the issue is the complexity of what should be a simple to achieve condition. So often I've heard stories like this on automated gear.

Brian

[John Rumm]

I might have *some* sympathy where a heating maintainer turns up to a complicated setup that is new to them, and has difficulty working out what is going on.

However in this case, they installed the new stat which suggests at a very minimum they should be able to pair the head with the receiver!

[Dave Plowman (News]

Did I mention calling out an engineer to sort mine? Sourced the engineer from the boiler maker's website, since the one I used before likely gone back to his EU country, as couldn't contact him.

After barely looking, he said the boiler needed replacing and would send a written quote. Which he did. Stating 'to replace combi boiler' - and mine is a system one. Did wonder since I'd heard him running the water to the bath when 'checking' it.

And some wonder when I think 'gas safe' is just another con.

[John Rumm]

The basic gas safe, means they can safely joint pipe and test for leaks... Alas it does not mean they know the first thing about heating systems!

[SteveW]

When I bought this house, I asked them to install a gas meter (the old one had been removed and capped off when the previous owners got into debt). Someone came, fitted the new meter, leak tested the system, declared it fine and left.

I then walked into the kitchen and took the entirely loose stop-end off the gas pipe to where the boiler should have been!

Later I installed my own boiler, moved the gas connector for the cooker, fitted a new fire, replaced the badly sagging lead gas pipes under the floor with copper ... and did my own test. Everything is still alright

29 years later.

[John Rumm]

A friend of mine had a bit of a shock when she discovered that the gas pipe feeding her boiler (which by this time she had been living with for many years), had a couple of joints that had never been soldered... The original fitter had fluxed up the joints, but forgot to actually solder them. However they were still gas tight. (one of the things about only have having 25 odd millibar of static pressure - it does not take that much to keep it in a pipe).

[John Walliker]

I discovered a similar problem when tracking down the source of a smell of burning. There was some pipe lagging draped over a halogen downlighter which was getting much too hot. When I tugged on the lagging to try and pull it away a great torrent of water came through the ceiling. This was caused by a joint in the central heating plumbing that had been fluxed but never soldered. The pipe simply pulled out of the coupler. It did seem remarkable that there had never been any sign of leakage before. The work had been done by a professional plumber some years previously. John

[Dave Plowman (News]

Yet just about everyone says only a gas safe engineer can do repairs of any sort on a gas boiler.