UKC

I've no idea about boilers so I have a question for the UKC collective mind. A couple of months ago our combi boiler started playing up. Sometimes we would have hot water and sometimes the boiler had decided to have the afternoon off. The boiler is covered under our home insurance policy with Barclays so we informed them and a bloke came out, had a look and replaced a part. Over the next few days the boiler continued to throw a strop every now and again so he came out again and replaced another part. Same thing happened again and he replaced ANOTHER part. I've just had a shower and the bloody thing is still faulty.

Is the engineer taking the piss or is this a usual occurrence? Each time we have had to get him back out we have had to go through the insurance rather than just phone him directly.

I've got no idea about this at all but it seems inefficient at best and (more likely) some kind of scam at worst. I suppose he could just be a poor engineer.

Any ideas?

Phone up the insurance company and tell them they've given some hundreds to someone clueless?

In reply to Morty:

It coups be that he is not that good but an intermittent fault can be a real bugger to find.
I had one on Thursday with a compressor that was failing to load.
98% of the time with this type it's the load really in the controller, 1% of the time it's the load solenoid and 1% of the time it's burned oil blocking the servo.

After a few hours of messing about I need to change my percentages, it was actually caused by some swarf in the oil circuit that must have been there from when it was built 8 years ago, it has migrated to a pinch point and occasionally blocks the feed that opens the intake.

Because it is an intermittent fault though had it worked once I had changed the controller I would have been likely to class it as fixed.

In reply to Morty:

Try using a plumber rather than an engineer.

In reply to Dax H:

Thanks, that makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing. The insurance company didn't seem at all concerned that he'd been out multiple times.

Cheers

In reply to Morty:

The other side of my story though.
When I found out it was not the controller (£600) or the load solenoid (£80) I put the customers original ones back on again.
This culture of "I don't know what it is but I will keep charging you for parts until it works again" pisses me off.

In reply to Dax H:

It seems like a licence to print money if the insurance company won't ask questions.

In reply to Morty:

Just like taking your car to the dealer for repair then!

In reply to Rigid Raider:


Always amuses me that when asking a garage for a quote the next question is "is it an insurance claim?"