In article ,
cynic writes:
Ho hum - went shopping this morning and noticed my neighbour had a
plumber/heating installers van outside. When I returned said van had
gone and neighbour looked distinctly cold. On speaking to him it
transpired installer knew nothing about the insides of the boiler
despite having installed and "comissioned" it. Since he could not fix
it he departed.
We had very severe frost last night so I enquired if there was an ice
plug in the condensate outlet. Neighbour got ladder out to look and it
turned out there was. Soon neighbour had kettle out and a warm house
soon after.
An hour later my phone rang and a friend told me he had no heat or hot
water. Jokingly I said it would be an ice plug in the condensate line.
Ten minutes later he phoned back to say it had been just that and
promised me a pint.
It seems there is a distinct lack of appreciation of the effects of
frost on condensate pipes by installers or are we afflicted worse than
others in our area?

I've a few different installers/repairers in action over the last
few years. I think the number of them who have any idea how a modern
boiler works is very low (none in my limited experience). First step
is a call to the manufacturer. Only one actually tried to follow the
fault flow chart, and failed to follow it (went from one box to another
with no line between them), so second step was a call to the manufacturer.

Some years ago when I phoned Keston's engineer help line, and soon as
I started talking about the flue gas CO2 level, you could hear the guy
at the other end suddenly change gear - seemed to come as a surprise
that he had someone on the phone who understood how the boiler worked.
The bloke was very helpful and went into detail about how to fine tune
it for very best operation, which isn't in the docs at all.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]