Will the clueless and gullible on here understand that manufacturers pay installers to promote their brand and Which magazine ceased to be a valid authority decades ago.
The recommendation of an installer or Which is worthless. I never said to trust Which, what i said was they are heavily influential in the market place, going for a boiler recommended by the installer if they have found a decent installer is not a bad idea, as i have said in previous threads, all boiler manufactures offer very lengthy warranties, and the chances of a boiler going faulty is remote, if this wasn't the case they wouldn't offer the long warranty they would be losing money hand over fist. The majority of time having the boiler installed by an accredited installer increases the warranty offered. When things do go wrong the boiler manufacture is easier to deal with if its installed by an accredited installer and most of the time the installer gets on well with the area rep which increases the chances of faults being fixed quickly. Also by going with the boiler the installer suggests chances are they have fitted a few of them and know how to set them up etc without having to get on the phone to a technical helpline or spend time trying to read the manual, going fot the installer recommendation is as much good for the customer as the installer.
Imagine a customer insisting you fitted a Ferroli and then called you up because its gone faulty....
On the other hand some of us just repair boilers and are therefore not so biased towards particular makes/models.
By all means go for these obscure brands..Viessmann, Intergas etc but from my experience you can be waiting a week for parts and few will want to work on them.
What happens when your installer is on holiday and you obscure boiler packs up?
If Intergas UK actually cared about customers they would sort out their product support, get more spares into merchants etc but until they do I wouldn't touch them.
I have one customer that waited over a week whilst a pump was shipped from the Netherlands the UK importer being so hopeless....that's no fun at Christmas.