Vaillant Ecotec 831 noisy heat exchanger

[treytrey]

My question is this, did he explain the right symptoms to vaillant on the phone? Because the noises you describe are also caused by a blocked heat exchanger, though this predominatly happens on domestic water demand when the boiler is at it's fullest gas rate.
But as you have mentioned it is durring the heat up and cool down period then that suggest's the two metals moving at different rates therefor the copper paste between them cures this.
It is all in the explanation and questioning of a customer, you have explained the fault really well and most engineers that have replied know exactly what the fault is and probably 90% of those who know, know how to cure it.

I wasn't completely happy with how he relayed the fault. He described it as "tapping" to Vaillant, which to my mind is underplaying it because I consider it louder, and it ramps up to proper clanking and clunking where it sounds like someone hitting the boiler from the inside with a small hammer several times a minute until everything is nice and hot.

I did interrupt and said that I though it was "a bit more than tapping noises", but I could hardly grab the phone off him in mid-sentence.

Maybe I will phone Vaillant and see if they give me a different answer if I describe the problem more fully.

Anyone have any other suggestions?

 

[treytrey]

Lets just say he will be coming back with some copper paste to place between the metals that are expanding at different rates, surprised this wasn't in his little black box of tricks to be honest.

Are you talking about this as a general cure for this kind of thing, or are you talking about this boiler model specifically? It would be really good if I could tell him that he needs to put copper paste between the exact components to fix the problem.

Otherwise I can see myself going through the cycle of a water test, powerflush, and then back to square one in a few weeks time of getting someone to listen to me to fix the problem.

 

[bell824]

Sometimes with these style heat exchangers there is a different expansion of the two types of metal, ( note i am not mentioning the metalic parts for safety reasons), were thes two metas are mechanically fixed together it is found that applying the copper paste allows them to move seperatly to fully warm or fully cold without making the "clunking noises" you describe.
Not just on this range but anything that uses a similar style.

Mention this and he may dig a bit further to get the answer he needs, heat exchangers sludged up generally make noise when they are at max temperature and still heating, therefor having the water tested is a complete waste of you and their time.

 

[Agile]

From what you have said about what he did, I dont think that he would have done anything different even if you had told him EXACTLY what was needed!

They are under pressure to make a certain number of visits every day and part of the way they do that is to ensure they dont do anything which takes very long.

Do any BG people admit that they all carry water sample bottles with them?

It sounds a bit rich to use that as an excuse. Even if he did not have one he could still have taken a sample in any bottle from your kitchen!

 

[scatmanjohn]

so the diagnosis was pretty much made by someone who wasn't on site.

So what's the difference in you searching the internet for a diagnosis?

Let the man on the job do his job. He may get it wrong to start with or he may be correct.

I have lost count of the number of jobs i have been to where the customer says " i have been on the internet and i need a new.....pcb...diverter...sensor...etc etc etc" only to find is is something completely different.

 

[fishhead1]

Does it sound like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-yMEAgEtyM

 

[treytrey]

so the diagnosis was pretty much made by someone who wasn't on site.

So what's the difference in you searching the internet for a diagnosis?

That's exactly my point. He's the expert on site, but he deferred against his own opinion in favour of someone down the phone, without even so much as taking the lid off the boiler or looking in the filter. I've asked here and been told it's definitely copper paste for metal expansion, he asked down the phone after explaining the problem badly, and been told it's another powerflush. Who's right? I can phone up and do a better job of asking for advice because I've lived with the problem and can describe it properly.

Let the man on the job do his job. He may get it wrong to start with or he may be correct.

I have lost count of the number of jobs i have been to where the customer says " i have been on the internet and i need a new.....pcb...diverter...sensor...etc etc etc" only to find is is something completely different.

I don't want to waste my time while they get it wrong. What I've been told is a simple fix here has turned into a couple of weeks of messing about that won't solve the problem. I'm going to have to take time out to wait for service appointments that half the time seem to be guys finding excuses not to do anything. This has pretty much been my long-term experience of British Gas - half the guys are useless, and half are fantastic, and it's pot luck who you get.

 

[treytrey]

Does it sound like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-yMEAgEtyM[/QUOTE]

No it doesn't. Sounds exactly like this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lVMHDU8dAY though it's anywhere from every couple of minutes to a dozen times a minute depending how it's heating things up. It's a clanging/clunking sort of noise that stops once the boiler is hot or cold. In this respect it's noisier than the 25 year old Potterton that it replaced.

 

[treytrey]

Double Post

 

[scatmanjohn]

I can phone up and do a better job

Do it then.

I don't want to waste my time while they get it wrong. What I've been told is a simple fix here has turned into a couple of weeks of messing about that won't solve the problem. I'm going to have to take time out to wait for service appointments that half the time seem to be guys finding excuses not to do anything. This has pretty much been my long-term experience of British Gas - half the guys are useless, and half are fantastic, and it's pot luck who you get.

That tells me more about you then it does about them.

Why would anyone continue to pay for something they are not satisfied with.

If you go out for a meal tonight and the food is terrible, half the staff are useless and keep finding excuses about why the food is no good and you end up with the runs , do you still go back and just put up with it?

 

[treytrey]

I can phone up and do a better job

Do it then.

Well it seems I did by searching around and asking here to get some experienced opinions by people who knew exactly what the problem is, as opposed to my BG engineer who had never heard the issue and didn't know anything about it. Who didn't even take a water sample while he was here and wants to come back next week to do it.

As I said, all he did was phone up and ask Vaillant, with a poor description of the problem. That's no different from what I can do.

That tells me more about you then it does about them.

Why would anyone continue to pay for something they are not satisfied with.

I'll leave aside the personal attack aside where you imply I'm foolish for getting in a big company who are supposed to know what they are doing. It's not my fault the engineer who turned up didn't have a clue what the problem was. There are several other people on this thread who knew straight away what they issue was. Maybe it tells me something about you that you think the customer is at fault when a company doesn't do the job it's been paid for?

The boiler was installed by BG and comes with two years of call-out/repair service. Why would I pay someone else to come in and do a repair when I've already paid for it as part of the installation and maintenance service? I have had a bad cowboy experience in the past, and at least BG will eventually get someone out to fix the problem, even if it takes a few attempts, and aren't going to sting me on price just because they've had to come back to try a few times.

BG are a big company you can chase and hold to regulations and consumer law. They have a complaints department you can deal with and will give you refunds for poor service. There are people you can talk to to get things sorted, which is more than you can say for a lot of companies.

As I said, I've had some great guys from British Gas who did terrific jobs, and some crappy ones you have to work through in order to eventually get you to a fix. It's just a shame that the quality guys are hidden amongst the ones who don't want to do any work when they turn up. I guess that doesn't make them any different from any random selection of RGIs.

It's just frustrating to deal with a guy who claims he doesn't know anything about the problem, when there are people here who know it's a relatively simple fix, and instead I have to faff around for another couple of weeks. It doesn't do anyone any favours if a water test and another powerflush don't cure the issue, it just wastes everyone's time and energy.

For instance, I won't be surprised if the guy who comes to do a powerflush in a couple of weeks is from a different team and ends up implementing a different fix with copper paste and never does the powerflush once I've explained the problem to him.

 

[Agile]

Perhaps I should point out that many of the guys that give advice on here are extremely knowledgeable.

Firstly they are so interested in the subject that after a day's work they come and give free advice on here.

Secondly, if the advice they gave was generally poor they would be openly criticised and would be more restrained. There have even been a few who have been banned from the site for giving consistently wrong and misleading information.

BG do employ people with a wide range of capabilities. That always surprises me because their earnings are pretty good and I would have expected that they could have been more selective.

That partly seems to arise because rather than mostly recruiting already experienced people they have historically taken on apprentices on the basis they can train them. Whilst the training seems to be mostly quite good, the capabilities of the trainees seems very variable and after taking them on they seem very reluctant to let them go!

Although the earnings are often better than most graduates could expect to earn for a long while, they dont seem to aim their recruitment at graduates or even those with good science "A" levels. All they ask for are four GCSEs!

Being female and good looking seems to help too!

http://www.britishgasjobs.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=21&lb=video&id=3&category=1

 

[treytrey]

BG do employ people with a wide range of capabilities. That always surprises me because their earnings are pretty good and I would have expected that they could have been more selective.

That partly seems to arise because rather than mostly recruiting already experienced people they have historically taken on apprentices on the basis they can train them. Whilst the training seems to be mostly quite good, the capabilities of the trainees seems very variable and after taking them on they seem very reluctant to let them go!

BG is such a big company, they need a lot of people. They ran into a lot of trouble a few years back by simply not having the staff to take on all the work they wanted to do, leaving a lot of people having paid for a service they didn't receive. They need to keep recruiting and training people all the time to fill the ranks.

The second thing is that the good people get trained up and then leave to start their own companies, often as sole traders. They are doing the same job but earning twice as much money, even when subcontracting for BG themselves. There's a core of experienced guys who for whatever reason don't want to strike out on their own, and a lot of trainees and people who just aren't that experienced or so good.

The good thing about BG from the customer point of view is that they are fixed fee, and will keep sending someone out until the job is fixed and it won't cost any more. For instance, this additional powerflush on my system won't cost me anything but my time because they did it 8 months ago. They will usually get someone out quickly, and they will work hard to rectify any mistakes if you talk to the right people.

BG do have plenty of issues, and for every good experience I've had with them, I can tell you a bad one as well, but in the end they will keep going until things are fixed.

 

[Agile]

Their staffing problem a few years ago was because they seemed to decide that servicing/repairing boilers was not good business and they decided to reduce the number of engineers.

They offered very generous voluntary redundancy terms which were taken up by most of the older and well experienced staff who then went to work on their own.

Shortly afterwards they came up with the annual insurance style heating cover which was an immediate winner. They then had to take on additional staff and having lost most of the experienced people were left with a younger profile with a lot of them with little experience. All this at a time when boilers were becoming more advanced and difficult to work on.

The earnings at BG can be so good ( £36-£46 k with overtime etc. ) that few would earn significantly more as an independent. But they would have the ability to pick and choose what they did and would be free of what many see as uncomfortable management requirements. Some might have been blessed with an early pension and could combine some work with golf and gardening and a far less stressful lifestyle.

Tony

 

[treytrey]

To keep everyone updated on the story, my engineer came back to take a (crystal clear) water sample, and now I have to wait 7-10 days to get the results back. If it comes back okay, the next step will be BG replacing the heat exchanger.

I asked about copper paste, and he said that if you're going to take the thing apart to past everything, you might as well change the exchanger, and that if the problem was in the small coils of metal inside the exchanger, there was no way to do anything with that.

He did say he's asked around, and the only similar problem they'd seen was a boiler that was making a louder noise than mine from new. There, Vaillant had told them to slacken some of the nuts off slightly (which he pointed out was very counter to the norm, as they hold the gases inside the exchanger), and this had solved the issue.

So now I'm just waiting to see what Furnox say about the water and inhibitor that was put into my system eight months back.