Anyone recommend a central heating boiler maintenance plan?

Sounds like you need a new boiler ! How old is it ? How big are your plumbers bills ? If they are big enough to worry about like that then it seriously is probably time to get a new boiler and will probably be cheaper as well and more efficient and come with a guarantee. Most boiler insurance (that I have glanced at) comes with so many caveats such as - they will pay nothing if they consider it beyond economic repair - that they are useless.

Or maybe you just need a plumber who can fix it properly.

No, but I can certainly warn you against a crap one. Don't go with British Gas.

As part of the deal, you get an annual service for your boiler. Trouble is, they don't give timed appointments and only come round midweek, so you have to take a day off work when it's time to service your boiler. And that's assuming they turn up when they say they will.

They also try to sell their service on the basis that you get a "priority emergency callout". That sounds impressive, but when our boiler broke down we discovered that the "priority emergency callout" service meant that it was 4 days before anyone came to look at it. On checking the small print, it turns out that they don't give any kind of guarantee of response times, so there was nothing we could do about this.

Except, of course, cancel the maintenance contract, which we did.

So if anyone else can recommend a good one, I'd also be interested.

Adam

Bitstring , from the wonderful person Adam said

The trick is to find a good plumber/heating engineer (one who'll be around for a while) and then pick a boiler he can service. As for insurance, don't .. just put the money in an ISA or something.

You may well find that the boiler manufacturers have their own service /guarantee operation. Of course you could just put the money away somewhere usefull then if you have a problem-use it, If not,keep it. I always say that the only insurance you need is that required by law AND travel insurance outside the EU !

Remove antispam and add 670 after bra to email

That`s what i`m doing now. We worked out (fiance and myself) that to insure against every problem that might happen would cost about 200 a month (I mean boiler, electrics, car faults etc, everything bar house and contents). So rather than piss away 200 a month we put it into an ISA. After a single year with nothing going wrong we`d have 2400 sat there, which is more than enough to solve pretty much any problem that might come up.

Plus when you have a little niggle with a car, we forget to take the money out of this fund, so it will only get dipped into when there is an expensive problem to fix. When it happens we`ll have the money there to call round and find someone who can come and fix the problem in a time frame to satisfy me. Not have to spend days chasing up British Gas (or similar) to come and do the work for us.

Yes. I use Domestic & General. I pay around £8 a month. I have a combi boiler and have needed to call on them twice in the past couple of years. On both occasions the boiler was promptly attended to by a knowledgeable engineer who sorted out the payment directly with Domestic & General.

Check the small print in your house insurance: you may well find that you are already covered for CH breakdowns, in which case you need not take out extra cover.

How often does your boiler play up? I've always worked on breakdown maintenance (do nothing until it stops working). Gas boilers in general have nothing much to be serviced. Our original one lasted 19 years with 3 or 4 repairs, usually the thermocouple in the pilot light, and one pump replaced. The current on is now 8 years old and has been seen to once, when the CPU was replaced. That was done by the manufacturer (Potterton).