Boiler Service
The Boiler service is something not many people think about until the central heating boiler starts to play up. The amount of calls we receive from customers, asking to book in a boiler service, and when you ask, any problems, they say, just a little problem nothing major, or words to that effect.
A Boiler service is very important, especially now with the likes of the condensing boilers, and many of the manufactures offering long warranty’s. It’s a bit like the car dealers offering long warrants on their models, part of the deal is servicing or the warranty becomes invalid. This is the same with the boiler, to keep the warranty running, you must have a boiler service once a year.
What I have noticed recently is that many engineers are not carrying out a boiler service to the full, as per manufactures instructions. It seem all they are doing is probing the boiler with the combustion analyzer probe, if the readings are ok, that’s it, that’s the boiler service. It seem this is what British gas do. We have been to many jobs where British Gas claim to have carried out a boiler service, only to told by the customer, all the engineer did was put this thing in the flue, and that was that, boiler service done in 5 minutes.
One thing we come across quite often with new customers is, they have called us in for a reason, their normal company or boiler service engineer, either won’t come back, or the customer doesn’t want them back. When we ask why, you sometimes get an answer like, I don’t think they new what they were doing.
Normally they call us in when a problem occurs, and their normal engineer cannot fix it.
One of the most common faults that we come across on a boiler service is, if the system is sealed, and the system is 4 years old or more, is the expansion vessel has lost pressure.
For some reason, many engineers seem to forget to check the expansion vessel.
Over time the expansion vessel looses it pressure, and as such, the system pressure gauge starts to rise very quickly. When this starts to happen, it then sometimes starts to discharge, through the pressure relief valve.
I recently went to carry out a boiler service on a Vaillant Eco-Tec 831, on talking to the customer; I asked why she did not call the installer back to do the boiler service. She told me that the system kept loosing pressure, and as such the installer came back six times, and kept saying you must have a leak somewhere. In the end she got fed up, and called us in.
This first thing we did was to check the expansion vessel, on checking we found it was full of water and had no pressure at all. The quickest way to cure this problem it to remove the vessel, empty the water out, then try to re-pressurize, if you are lucky enough the pressure takes, otherwise it’s a new vessel.
The boiler service is very important in that it also tells you if things are starting to breakdown, or there may be a small internal leak, that if left untouched could turn into something major.
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