I had mentioned upthread that our boiler needed changing. I was hoping to eek it out to the new year - but it had different ideas and failed catastrophically week before last with water flooding out from it.
British Gas wanted £6,500 to replace like for like - as near as possible re building regs - so moving from the floor to wall etc. or £7,800 to replace it with a combi and again move it.
Local firm wanted £3600 for a straight swap - same as the first BG quote - but couldn't do it until after xmas. A couple of independent plumbers were a few hundred cheaper but availability was difficult.
We decided to go for an online company - they had availability - and read the reviews. We went for iHeat who had decent reviews - there were a few bad reviews too, but that was the same for the others and even the local firms had the odd bad review up. We specified a similar set up to the second BG quote and it came to £3500 with us choosing a more powerful boiler.
They used a local plumber / gas safe engineer anyway. Turned up when promised. Took 2 days to do the job. Left us with water over night.
You get to know how good a company is when things go wrong. They delivered the boiler to the gas safe installer. He brought it to site and opened it up to find the wall bracket missing.
The fitter was worried because he called around and it's not the sort of part that is stocked locally - the company couriered a replacement part same day - so it arrived without delaying the job.
Then some upgrades we ordered weren't required and they cost £150. The plumber took them away with him and we were refunded without asking or chasing! (I had ordered some TRV's but over ordered as I forgot some radiators already had some fitted.)
When checking the plumbing before the install the plumber found a leak to the pipework to the sink in our en-suite. I knew there was a slow leak as the vanity unit was damaged by water, but I couldn't find it.
The plumber fixed it and added two isolation valves so we could change the vanity unit over at our leisure.
Switching to a combi - boiler was controversial - because using two showers at a time can impact performance but the difference it has made to water pressure around the whole house is amazing and whilst there are only two of us here at most times, there have been five for a few days this week and no real problems have been encountered.
(First world problem - the water pressure is now so high to the showers that the plastic roses within the shower heads - both Mira - were actually blown out.)
I would recommend iHeat - good pricing - did everything that was quoted by BG including removing both cold water tanks from the loft and were less than half the BG price - for a better boiler - and an install about 10 days sooner than BG could manage. Old flue removed. Brickwork replaced - with bricks - re-rendered - though not painted.
Last edited by: zippy on Sun 24 Dec 23 at 14:15
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Boilers 
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