this is a stupid post, it depends completely on the boiler. anywhere between 15mins and 3 hours for most boilers. MIs are often stupid, asking for cleaning/checking of something thats pointless, yet completely overlooking something more important and potentially saving a breakdown. Any quality, and reasonably experienced engineer should be able to carry out an effective service on most appliances without the aid of a book.
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3 hours 
for an experienced engineer, that must be a right heap.
How can you do a service without knowing minimum pressure, max pressure, ignition pressure, not to mention under pressure or CO2 rate?
Don't know about you, but I forget that stuff within the week.
for an experienced engineer, that must be a right heap.How can you do a service without knowing minimum pressure, max pressure, ignition pressure, not to mention under pressure or CO2 rate?
Don't know about you, but I forget that stuff within the week.
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£43-48 for boiler + visual on cooker. Add another £30-ish for a fire.
As well as the other requirements, they also service and replace batteries in smoke detectors. In the next couple of months, they'll be installing CO detectors and getting a bonus for every one installed.
10% of all services are externally audited and believe me, we have one picky auditor. Maybe once or twice a year he'll find a dirty one. The auditor is more likely to pick them up on missed defects rather than an incomplete service.
You seem to live in a different world to mine!
I met someone at a Baxi boiler course who worked on social housing for a contractor and had to service a back boiler and fire AND test and issue a CP12 in just 22 minutes ! If he did not work at that rate he would lose his bonus. The firm got just £17.50 each!
He worked an extra hour or two a day as the bonus was about 25% of the salary.
I expect to take 1.25 hours to service a BBU and fire and another 15 minutes to do the CP12.
One of my trainees had been to 11 CP12s with a previous firm and had NEVER seen any tests ever being done, not even a tightness test. He was relieved when he saw that I expected everything he was taught in college to be done and a few other checks as well.
Tony
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Well, I'm extremely happy to be living on my own little patch where we pay our contractors more for a quality job. If those were the specs for my contractors, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
3 hours
How can you do a service without knowing minimum pressure, max pressure, ignition pressure, not to mention under pressure or CO2 rate?
Don't know about you, but I forget that stuff within the week.
yes I was giving one extreme to another. Max bp on the data badge, Min on data badge, ign you can use your judgement, and CO2 whilst the book will tell you the Manf recommendation, again with a a bit of knowledge you can use your judgement.
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namsag
I found that council services actually took a lot longer if you actually went into the property instead of doing it through the letterbox.
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charliechaplinspants
Look, I don`t regard this as a stupid post, (mickyg) it was simply an honest question about roughly, i say roughly how long should one expect a service to take. Judging by the responses and apart from some guys spitting their dummies out, it`s been very informative. So I believe, it can take from 20 mins up to an hour or more depending on the make of boiler. Thank you Gentlemen.
P.S. ( Sorry to clf-gas for mis-quoting ).
Just a quick one about the poor guys servicing in the social housing sector.
This is a true story told to me by the guy doing the service. He went to do a service on a back boiler, when taking his pressures at meter/boiler etc he found that the gas supply was undersized to the boiler. He turned off the boiler, filled out the forms etc, carried on with normal duties. That afternoon he got a phone call from the office asking him why he turned off boiler etc. After explaining, he was then told that every back boiler on this council estate had been piped up in the same way for 20 years and had done OK. so go and turn it back on!He refused unless the pipe was re-sized. They sent out another engineer who turned it back on & guess who was `made redundant` 3 months later.
This behaviour is being condoned by one of the larger main players in the social housing sector. ( domestic gas contractors ). Nothing to do with BG but they are a major player in the social housing sector. I`m sure some of the chaps on here actually work for them and will recognise this statement, maybe they would like to support it. who knows.
P.S. ( Sorry to clf-gas for mis-quoting ).
Just a quick one about the poor guys servicing in the social housing sector.
This is a true story told to me by the guy doing the service. He went to do a service on a back boiler, when taking his pressures at meter/boiler etc he found that the gas supply was undersized to the boiler. He turned off the boiler, filled out the forms etc, carried on with normal duties. That afternoon he got a phone call from the office asking him why he turned off boiler etc. After explaining, he was then told that every back boiler on this council estate had been piped up in the same way for 20 years and had done OK.
so go and turn it back on!He refused unless the pipe was re-sized. They sent out another engineer who turned it back on & guess who was `made redundant` 3 months later.This behaviour is being condoned by one of the larger main players in the social housing sector. ( domestic gas contractors ). Nothing to do with BG but they are a major player in the social housing sector. I`m sure some of the chaps on here actually work for them and will recognise this statement, maybe they would like to support it. who knows.
Unless the company that won the bid only uses long term employees, it really does not matter what the council pay them.
Quite often the council give the contract to a large company, they subcontract parts out to different, smaller companies, who use tempagencies to supply day to day staff.
The chap at the bottom of the ladder is effectively hired by the hour, gets payed per job, has no loyalty to the agency (why should he?) has no incentive to do a good job and tries to do as many jobs as possible to earn some cash. It goes down to as low as £15 per address. From that he has to pay his travel, parking, tools, holiday allowance and tax. That leaves about a tenner to take home, if that.
If you average an hour and a half for service, paperwork, travel and parking, he could be down to 300 quid a week; exactly how much work do you expect for that?
And what is this VISUAL on a cooker?
If it is part of the flat, it MUST have a complete inspection and service if not fully working to spec. If it belongs to the tenant, it has nothing to do with the council.
Sounds familiar.
Did some inspecting years ago on fab contract (was paid for visits, whether tenant in or not
) and failed probably every third address, had one day where I had transco out 3 times before lunch for emergency disconnection.Got a call from clueless bird in the office asking me if that was really necessary. "Can't you just approve them? This is very inconvenient for the tenants, and we don't have time to do all these repairs."
I think they had between 1000 and 2000 properties, and 1 RGI to do all maintenance and repair.
They used to have a second, but the budget did not allow to keep him.
They probably are the specs for the guys that actually do the job, as chances are, they are subbies that get paid per job, and sacked if they don't do enough of them or fail too many.
If you want to keep your job, (and they all do, especially now with the worst recession in living memory) you shut up, do as many as the boss tells you, and only fail those that are so bad they should be riddored.
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charliechaplinspants
Bet the company still have their blanket Corgi/Gas safe badge though, just like the company I am talking about.
Of course they do, big part of why it is subcontracted out.Bet the company still have their blanket Corgi/Gas safe badge though, just like the company I am talking about.
Not only can you pocket £10 to £20 for doing nothing but printing a job sheet and sending the invoice, it is also wonderful for deniability.
Any problems are sent to the contractor.
The contractor says: " We are aware that a small percentage of the engineers (the subbies from the tempagency) have performed below expectation. We are very sorry about this and apologise sincerely. The matter has our full attention, and is addressed as we speak."
Which means: some left because they didn't earn anywhere near as much as we insinuated, and some got booted because they asked difficult questions.
We have found some new doormats who will get the blame next time it is found out what a carp job we do.
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charliechaplinspants
Absolutely spot on! you sure you are in London?
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