In article .uk,
Ed Sirett writes:
Mine's a Kane 400.
It cost £400 to buy.
It costs £200 every other year to keep running, apart from the fact that I
ought to have the machine calibrated from time to time the O2 cell lasts
about two years. So as soon as it fails to initialize I send it to Kane.

I rarely use the digital manometer.
I never use the temp probes
I use the CO2 + CO/CO2 readings all the while.
I don't have or need the printer
It does not do NOx or smoke, which I understand is important for oil
burners.

It may well be that a Kane 250 which only has the gas analyser (and maybe
the temp - I haven't taken note of the spec) would work for me just
aswell.

I have the 250, and I believe it has everything you need (and
more) to do a gas boiler service. It does have temperature probe.
If you are not in a hurry for one, just keep an eye out over
some months for special offers. IIRC, mine came from BES.
This is something I wouldn't risk buying second-hand, at least
not without factoring in a service by Kane, and the possibility
of finding you bought an unrepairable one, which means it would
have to be almost free in the first place as far as I'm concerned.

BTW Ed, I thought it was the CO monitor which had the limited
life? Mine's about 16 months old but doesn't get anywhere near
the usage a gas engineer's one would. It is still initialising
in about 15 seconds, which is what it was when new, so it may
be dependant on use. (When it takes more than 60 seconds, the
sensor is regarded as worn out.) I also saw a suggestion
somewhere that life is significantly lengthened if you make
sure you purge all the CO from the sensor before you switch off.
The unit tries to do this anyway, but I don't even attempt to
turn it off (or turn off the air pump) until CO reading has
dropped to 1 or 0 ppm. Don't really know if that helps though.
I also keep it in a sealed plastic bag when not in use, to
help avoid background contaminents slowly degrading the sensors,
although again, I don't know if that makes any difference, but
it would be less so anyway for one which was frequently used.

--
Andrew Gabriel