Terrible service from Worcester Bosch engineer

[JP Coetzee]

I have a 9-year-old Bosch Greenstar which very occasionally behaves strangely - without a tap running the hot water heating "cycles" without lighting. Although the temperature knobs are not set to maximum (set to "E" and "dot") the temperature shows 88-91 degrees and the boiler "clicks" every 4 seconds but the burner doesn't light. On the timeswitch the hot water and central heating are both ON and the pressure is OK (between 1 and 2). If I turn the hot water heating off at the timeswitch the cycling stops.

It only happens every couple of months so I took a video of it -

sent the video to WB but they said they could not look at it for internet security reasons and insisted I book a service so an engineer could look at the boiler.

The WB engineer came today and was totally disinterested. He hardly looked at my video and said he had no idea what the problem was, he'd have to look during the service. He serviced the boiler in about 30 minutes. He seemed totally bored and only interested in ticking the boxes to say he'd done the service. At the end of the job he said he couldn't find anything wrong and to phone WB if the problem happened again!

I reminded him that it was a very occasional fault and asked if I had to wait until the boiler failed completely or blew up. "Yeah".

Also, that 30 minutes of "work" cost me =A3115 and the last time the boiler was serviced the engineer took much longer.

I am very, very unhappy with Worcester Bosch.

Can anyone suggest what might be causing the problem? And recommend a suitable engineer in Bristol?

[cynic]

At 9 years old the company will only want to sell you a new boiler.

[dom]

These days, a large proportion of trades/crafts/techs choose to work for themselves if they're any good. (there's exceptions - e.g. Miele engineers).

Look for a highly regarded independent local person.

[Doctor Drivel]

At 9 years old the company will only want to sell you a new boiler.

[Michael Chare]

You possibly have an intermittent electrical fault.

If the fault does not occur whilst someone is looking at the boiler and it is not a known problem, the chances of it being fixed are slender. particularly if you can't take it to pieces yourself and find which part is making the noise.

You could try describing the problem to some local heating engineers, but I would avoid any 0800 numbers.

I assume that it is an oil boiler. These normally need servicing annually so if you have not had a recent service you may not have wasted your money.

[John]

It only happens every couple of months so I took a video of it -

sent the video to WB but they said they could not look at it for internet security reasons and insisted I book a service so an engineer could look at the boiler.

The WB engineer came today and was totally disinterested. He hardly looked at my video and said he had no idea what the problem was, he'd have to look during the service. He serviced the boiler in about 30 minutes. He seemed totally bored and only interested in ticking the boxes to say he'd done the service. At the end of the job he said he couldn't find anything wrong and to phone WB if the problem happened again!

I reminded him that it was a very occasional fault and asked if I had to wait until the boiler failed completely or blew up. "Yeah".

Also, that 30 minutes of "work" cost me £115 and the last time the boiler was serviced the engineer took much longer.

I am very, very unhappy with Worcester Bosch.

Can anyone suggest what might be causing the problem? And recommend a suitable engineer in Bristol?

I seem to recall reading that "E" will attempt to prevent the boiler going cold - to save making a cold start. However, perhaps it then fails to light because it is still warm from the last session.

[Lobster]

To be fair, that won't be them being arsey - very many workplaces have Youtube permanently blocked to users for obvious reasons.

Hmm. Sounds like the thing's haunted to me... ;-)

David

[js.b1]

Ah, the "Deny All" IT Department :-)

Can you send them printed off stills showing the problem, inserted into a word document with appropriate text kept as succinct as possible, to a known technically competent person? Engineers do exist out there, you just have to find them past marketing faced departments.

The problem is the age of the boiler, 9yrs is more than many recent boilers may last.

[Tim Downie]

The fact that the temperature reading is wrong suggests to me that 'it's not a problem with a sensor or some other electrical peripheral device. I would suspect a PCB problem. Hopefully Geoff will chime in some tme soon and offer his thoughts.

Tim

[Falco]

I wonder if its covered under Soga? ;-)

[Tim Downie]

At that age, suely you mean SAGA? ;-)

Tim

[Falco]

Nice one Tim - ROTFL

[Tim..]

TOTALLY irrelevant. There is NO excuse for poor service.

Ring up WB CS and get firm with them, demanding they send another engineer, who is competant.

Tim.

[geoff]

Did you mean Saga ?

SOGA max is 6 years

[geoff]

In message , Tim Downie writes

Bugger - that's two people who have pre-empted my witty retort in the space of a couple of days

[geoff]

In message , Tim Downie writes

I've been thinking about this and the PCB sounds most likely, but I'm not sure, I don't know the greenstar well enough (although I should)

Don't WB replace up to 3 major items on their fixed price repair - the OP should have insisted on them changing the PCB

Maybe he should shout at them loudly until they do

[Derek Geldard]

My experience of intermittent faults on complicated electronic systems is that once it has been determined that there is no logical route to a diagnosis (Perhaps because the fault is not usually present ) the service engineer ends up dividing the system into three or four sub assemblies and swaps them out in turn.

This is problematic for the service manager because the cost of the repair is disproportionate to what the customer's kit is worth so it's difficult to bill out the total cost of the repair.

Yes, the OP needs to get W.B. to embark on this pocess, despite the fact it can be a bit of a loss-leader for them.

Having said that there have been several occasions in my experience when at the end of this process all the sub-assemblies have been changed and it seems the only thing left which is original is the fault. (Often bad earth / bad power supplies/ power supply connections can cause this)

Derek.

[Stuart Noble]

IME WB have a senior engineer for each area that does the 2nd call if there's any hint of incompetence. One of their engineers cross threaded a pump connection on my boiler that caused it to leak 6 months after the original fix. They accepted liability and did the job for free, but only after I'd agreed the £200+ call out charge in advance. Intermittent faults are a bugger for any service engineer I would have thought. Knowing what it might be if you could get it to do what it allegedly does now and then....

[Huge]

Tell me about it. We've finally got our 30 y/o Trianco Stuart oil boiler running properly after 5 or 6 visits by 4 different engineers.

[Jethro]

Tell me about it ... When I used work in cars, we had a car which would stop with no warning, and not start straightaway. However whenever we, or the AA got there, it would start immediately and run fine for weeks ...

Finally we had it in for an MOT, we were driving it off the ramp, and it stopped, and wouldn't start. Immediately my brother popped the bonnet, and we found there was no spark ... so we had finally nailed the ignition system. After that it was a case of inspecting every component until we found there was a magnetic pick-up in the distributor ... it's wires had hardened and the movement of the advance/retard mechanism had sheared them as clean as if you'd done it with a knife. After that we checked them regularly on services, noting with amusement that the manufacturer started recommending this a few months later ...

Another case was a car which made a clonking noise right up till the customer bought it into us. Eventually we twigged and drove it alone ... turned out having a passenger in the car managed to push down that tiny bit more on the suspension ...