Owning your own home

It's nearly 10 years old and it is a pretty cheap Ariston. I'd rather not replace it right now as the engineer said he thought it was in remarkably good condition for its age, although that is now questionable based on what's happening.

Could post in epicWTF, golf club or middle-aged threads but thought I'd checkout replacing the lower basket in our 10yr old Miele dishwasher which has lost a couple of spikes.

£314.58!!! Fucking jokers.

I had the same issues, boiler was 10 years old, end up getting a new one for 2 grand with a 10 years warranty.

Our boiler was pretty good, but I kept spending money on the diagnostic and fix.

I personally wouldnt have spent any money on that but that's where your at now.

turned out my semi-working bosch dishwasher i posted about a few pages ago needed a new heating element; which is part of the same unit which includes the motor and water sensor. £193 for materials and labour... best bit is that it was only 4 months out of the 4 year warranty

Appreciate the advice, if the engineer had said that to me at the start then I'd have probably gone with that but he seemed to think it was fine.

Can you recommend a quality brand I should look at replacing it with?

We fit Baxi stuff and have done for years. Reliable, easy to work on but like everyone they have their favourites.

I don’t rate Worcester personally, I think they are over priced and over rated.

I’d look at what company (locally) supplies them, and it’s worth going for one with a decent warranty (like 10 years).

Now have a Worcester, positive experience due to local boiler company.

Lol, my Vaillant boiler is from 1997.

My boiler is about 15 years old I think, leaks but I have some tupperware that collects the water just fine (unless I forget to empty it).

I'm just waiting for it to fall off the wall before I get it replaced.

You'll no get that out any new boiler on the market now that's for sure.

I know.

I mean it's great that you can repair them forever, but when repairing is the cost of a new replacement 🤷

Sort of like spares for Campag.

Can you recommend a quality brand I should look at replacing it with?

Idk where your boiler is located, but it's also worth checking if changing the make/model will change installation costs.

Our heating engineer seemed decent and honest, and said that if we wanted to change model the installation would cost more due to flu(?) and pipework. So we replaced our WorcesterBosch like-for-like. Cost was £2100 all in.

Obvs I no real way of validating his statement, but it seemed logical and £2100 felt about right.

We replaced our old crap combi with a Valliant - just because the nice plumber I use likes working on them. Another reason to replace old boilers is new ones are more efficient and will help (a bit) with crazy bills.

How about 1986? That's what I have.

Builders FINALLY finished in the bedroom yesterday. Looking forward to some peace and quiet. Nope, same builders have started full on extension works next door.

can you get it listed?

Least you'll know where to find them

True, and they live locally too. And at least the noise is not contributing to mess here.

I've said before, they're not perfect, but they're nice guys and I'm glad we now have a relationship with them.

That what I was doing for a while, but didn't seem sensible.

A couple of friends both on here and not have sent me some recommendations so will ring a few people up and get quotes.

Wife is anti getting a new boiler but I seem to have convinced her that they don't make boilers to last 40 years any more.

I am hoping that since it was upgraded from standard + hot water tank to combi just under 10 years ago, that there's no major pipework changes needed but happy to listen to whatever the professional says.

We used Heatable who weren't too bad - they outsource everything but its definitely fixed price. They came to install and realised they had to run a bigger gas pipe from the meter to the boiler that was all included absorbed in the original quote.

From my limited experience, relating entirely to combi boilers:

• Every heating engineer has a brand preference and good reasons why you should never go anywhere else.
  
• Worcester, Vaillant, Viesmann all seem to be highly rated (and Baxi, above!)
  
• Worcester had the highest warranty (I think it was 10, upgraded to 12 if you got their fitter) although warranties pointless unless you follow their service plan.
  
• I strongly considered Viesmann because various reviews said they are objectively better (though I can’t remember why, maybe something to do with the heat exchanger itself?). I didn’t get Viesmann as they are newer to the UK and so apparently have fewer engineers —> longer call out time etc. and they didn’t have one as powerful
  
• I then got a completely overpowered boiler (50Kw)- deliberately - for reasons that made no sense to me they seem to rank boilers by how many radiators they can run, but a boiler that can run 15 rads has a higher flow rate (litres per minute of hot water at a particular temp coming out of the taps) than a boiler that can run fewer radiators. As a normal human being I wanted a piping hot shower with pressure that could strip the skin from my flesh and (the advantage of a combi) never run out. I don’t think any combi can be as good as a high pressure system, but the one we got was pretty fantastic tbh if expensive (Worcester Bosch greenstar Style or Life (can’t remember) 50kW - 20.3 litres/minute at some temperature can’t remember.
  
• To accommodate that, and because everything was being ripped out anyway, I also had a new wider bore water main installed (water pressure from street was great, so it was worth doing), and a new wider bore gas main installed (they were moving the pipes anyway so wider bore wasn’t a big deal) to make sure the boiler got the maximum juice possible.
  
  

Result - two showers at the same time possible, no more shouting downstairs “please stop doing the washing up” etc.

I know someone that was fitting veissman and said they were having a lot of problems and they said veissman liked to pull every trick under the sun to get out of warranting them. So I never fitted one after that and just stuck to what we know.

You're paying for the hot water on most combis, even a cheapo bottom of the range will heat most houses within reasons. 50kw seems a bit OTT imo unless you've got a massive house and now if you want tons of hot water unvented is a better option.

Interesting re Viesmann. Bullet dodged. Agree that 50kw is probably overkill - it was a small house with a loft conversion and so there wasn't much room for a big cylinder+expansion tank. It was an unorthodox solution but has been brilliant.