Numbers Bernard numbers.
Baxi Duotec 40 HE - Tearing my hair out
- Thread starter Eric Walton
- Start date
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The "DIY Gas nonsense" you refer to, is actually the law, and also Forum Rules. The guys are already giving up their time to advise for free, but there comes a limit to how much advice they can give in certain circumstances. Every OP want to know 'so they can be better armed when their RGI arrives', but we don't know that! They could be digging for information to help them do the job themselves, and thus putting themselves, their family and/or neighbours and anyone else nearby in great danger. You then have the next person who comes along, Googles their boiler, finds this thread and also has a bash, armed with half the info and none of the kit need to do the job properly and safely.
Ultimately the balance has to be struck between being helpful and not giving too much away. Poster who then get arsey will get a taste of their own medicine. Always seems its the ones who have got through several gas engineers that also get the most annoyed when they aren't told what they want to hear, coincidence?
Do these people go to the garage for an MOT on their car, and start arguing with the tester on what it's failed on, or take it to a dealer for repair, and then start demanding to know what is wrong so they can fix it themselves? I doubt it....
Ultimately the balance has to be struck between being helpful and not giving too much away. Poster who then get arsey will get a taste of their own medicine. Always seems its the ones who have got through several gas engineers that also get the most annoyed when they aren't told what they want to hear, coincidence?
Do these people go to the garage for an MOT on their car, and start arguing with the tester on what it's failed on, or take it to a dealer for repair, and then start demanding to know what is wrong so they can fix it themselves? I doubt it....
You should have one. Who services your boiler every year?
What you and all the other non industry people fail to understand is that an RGI training and assessment only covers basic safety with gas appliances. It does not cover fault diagnosis.
Some RGIs take additional training at their own expense to learn how to do boiler repairs. That needs commitment and a logical mind. Many on this forum have entered the industry from backgrounds where they did fault finding in other fields.
In this case for some reason the OP did not let Plumber 2 buy the gas valve himself as would be normal. There must have been some money saving reason for him to drive 40 miles to buy one himself.
Many RGIs will still come to "repair" a boiler knowing they are not going to lose any money and might get what they want which is the chance to fit a new boiler. Those never buy the allegedly faulty part but get the client to do that so they don't risk their own money.
Last, the only way to diagnose a fault is at the boiler, NOT on an internet forum. In this case it sounded like the ignition electrode but could have been the ignition lead or even the PCB or just possibly the gas valve or a problem with the gas supply.
Tony
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I realise its the rules, that doesnt mean the rules are correct or that i agree with them, and i'm point out why i take that view. And yes there is a balance to be struck, but when the trades on this forum seem unable to accept that the real world is FULL of cowboys that balance is seriously skewed.
As for your MOT point, i've done EXACTLY that in the past, when a tester failed my car for having no Cat and faulty headlamp washers. I had to physically point the cat out to the guy and show him the headlamp washers werent "faulty", they werent fitted at all (and thus cant fail). As you can imagine, i never used that MOT station again, but it doesnt change my point, that many tradesmen in all disciplines are incompetent. And yes, i also repair my car myself.
Fair point, and something that needs rectified, as thus far it hasnt been serviced since we moved in a couple years ago.
But takes us back to my original point. I had a quick look this morning at some review sites looking for a local RGI, the best rated company on there also happened to have a bad review, stating the guy charged £60 for a boiler service which took 10 minutes and the cover didnt even come off. Now unless you actually know what a service entails, its impossible to be able to review a tradesman on his servicing work. So all those positive reviews are essentially junk, because they're made by folk that dont actually know if hes done the work properly. The one bad review could be an isolated case, or, more likely to me, suggests hes not servicing any boiler properly, and the positive reviews simply have no clue.
And this is the crux of the issue. The war cry on here is "Get an RGI" and yet many of the RGI's are useless, or have an ulterior motive to get a bigger job like replacing the whole thing.
Why the OP bought the gas valve rather than the plumber seems to be a moot point. Given the guy vanished off the face of the earth after failing to fix it, even if the guy had supplied the part would have made no difference to the situation. The OP would be out the same cash and still had a faulty boiler with no recourse because the guy was a dick.
And sure, i accept that you can only definitively fix a boiler by actually being in front of it, its just a shame that the forum rules stop actual useful advice being given out, that might help stop people getting ripped off.
I'll put my hand to most things, but i recognise the issues with gas, and as such its one of the few things i leave to the pro's. But ofcourse i do that, and end up with something that i'd have done better myself, as happened recently with a new gas supply for a hob which the bloke hadnt bothered actually attaching to the wall. I ended up adding some fixings and clipping it in place myself.
Which brings me back to my original point, how is joe public supposed to select someone thats actually competent?
To be fair the majority of people who post on here are those who have had problems with the repair of their gas appliances and are looking for advice on how to avoid a similar incident with a new ( to them ) service technician.
For every person who has posted about their experience with incompetent service / repair there are hundreds of people who have no need to seek advice because they have been satified with the service / repair to their appliance.
Among those hundreds will be some who thought the service / repair was carried out properly because they were un-aware what should have been done.
For every person who has posted about their experience with incompetent service / repair there are hundreds of people who have no need to seek advice because they have been satified with the service / repair to their appliance.
Among those hundreds will be some who thought the service / repair was carried out properly because they were un-aware what should have been done.
Some of us purely work on recommendation. Talk to your neighbours, friends, relatives.
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Yeh, but as i've mentioned above, unless those neighbours/friends/relatives are RGI's, they dont have the knowledge to know if the RGI they are recommending is actually any good, and as this thread shows, even if they hired someone that did a good job of, say, installing their boiler, it doesnt then follow that they have a clue about fault diagnosis.
My parents had their boiler serviced for years, originally a council house and serviced by them, then they bought it, it was a noisey old thing (really bad water hammer when it was turning off) and various excuses came forth about the noise from various RGI's that both the council sent out and that dad hired over the years thru the usual recommendations etc. Who knows if it was ever properly serviced. When i had a bit of savvy in my late teens, i had a look myself, and realised the bypass pipe on the boiler was in the wrong place, it was before the pump, rather than after it. Had been like that since installation by the council. He called the most recent RGI guy back out and he moved the pipe for free as he was a bit embarrassed that a teenager had shown him up, and the boilers been silent ever since.
The last house i rented i had a good chat with the RGI who was doing the boiler safety check for the landlord, and he was telling me how when he'd come to service the boiler the previous year, the cover wouldnt come off as it had been plastered around. He had to hack bits of plaster away to get the cover off it to complete the service, clearly he was a half decent bloke who wanted to do a good job, but the paperwork showed it had been "serviced" for n years previous to his visit by others, despite that plaster and the surrounding wallpaper being easily 10 years old... Sure enough the next year we ended up with a different guy, presumably cheaper, who serviced it by looking thru the hole on the front
.So i've had plenty experience with crappy tradesmen such that i simply dont trust any of them until they've proven to be trustworthy. Unforunately that requires a roll of the dice and a chance that you've picked a cowboy. Many of the guys on here are clearly knowlegable, and i'd happily have them work on my house, but none of them are local. The problem is they seem to have an attitude whereby any suggestion that an RGI is a cowboy is somehow an attack on them personally, and that the vast majority of RGI's are decent, when my own and others personal experiences seems infact to suggest the opposite. That attitude turns threads like this into a mess of name calling, and achieves nothing. They should, as a professional, be able to recognise the fact that there are loads of incompetent RGI's, and use their knowledge and advice to guide people towards a decent one.
Where i live now i have no family nearby, so any recommendations from there wouldnt be any use anyway. Friends all live further away and i work 40miles away so work colleagues recommendations arent much use either. The gas guy that did the cooker was a recommendation from a work colleague of the missus, but he turned out to be a plank too. I could ask the neighbour, but i dont see how her testimony is really any more reliable than throwing a dart at the yellow pages?
There are bad as well as good plumbers/RGI's shock. There are also bad as well as good doctors, dentists, joiners, plasterers etc. How do you pick a good one if you don't know anything? Dunno, sometimes life's just a lottery innit. Get practising your darts.
These are probably the same people who feel ill, so Google their symptoms, and then think they are dying, so refuse to believe their G.P. when he/she tells them its only a virus.....
D
Dean744PiN5
Well this was my point?
Some things are obvious, if your plasterer or joiner does a crap job, you can look with your eyes, realise its crap, and use someone else. Those trades produce a very visible end result, and people sort of expect a wall to be flat and smooth, or their doors to open and close without catching the floor or jamming on the frame. Sometimes a crap job can be done and it looks alright to your untrained eye, but to a pro it would be obvious its a crap job. Or they might have cut corners and it only appears crap sometime later. We've all come across threads on here where someone posts some pictures of an install that to the untrained might look perfectly acceptable, neat and tidy, and then a Pro points out X Y and Z arent right.
As always, it turns into "take the ****" thread, despite the fact i'm making a valid point. At no point have i stated i can go and watch youtube and become an expert heating installer. What i'm saying is that with a little bit of research and background info, instead of being clueless and blindly throwing darts you can apply some level of plausibility to a decision, and have a level of confidence in what your expert is telling you.
If you take your car to the garage with a slipping clutch, and the mechanic tells you its not really a slipping clutch, the car just needs a new fuel pump, you know probably enough about the workings of your car to suspect that hes probably talking rubbish, and might ask for a second opinion. That doesnt mean your going to haul the engine out yourself and fit a new clutch.
If your RGI tells you the boilers not firing due to a faulty gas valve, when a cursory external inspection of the boiler shows the fans not even starting up, or ignition system isnt sparking you again can suspect he might be talking rubbish. That doesnt mean your going to set about with the spanners changing the fan or ignition unit. Such basic diagnostic steps are so secret that they're often even printed in the boilers manual which is freely downloadable and might even exist in paper form right next to the broken boiler if the owner hasnt chucked it out.
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