In article ,
gremlin_95 writes:
On 02/02/2012 16:01, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In articleF_Gdnc68mbccMrfSnZ2dnUVZ8m2dnZ2d@brightvie w.co.uk,
John writes:
Others in this group have had good results with Viseman, Man Eco
Hometec,& Keston.
Keston, really?

I have one and it's been OK given that I can DIY fix it (I did install
it after all), but it would have been unsuitable for, say, my parents,
whose Potterton Suprema has provided a more trouble-free service;-)

Is anyone other than me still running a Keston C25? It was quite
popular here when I installed it because Keston supported DIY
installers (in those days, condensing boilers were only installed
by DIY installers, councils, and housing associations). However,
my impression is that they had all died after about 5 years.

The current Keston C36 (?) only ever gets a bad press, as far as I've
noticed.
I am sure Ed Sirret used to have a Keston...

Yes, a C25. He installed his about the same time I did mine,
although we didn't know this until afterwards. I got the full
details from Keston of how to set the gas mixture, and I gave
them to him. (The instructions in the manual are no good.)
Although the gas mixture was supposed to be factory set, we
all found it was miles out when we installed ours, so far out
the burner wouldn't work properly and the thing made a sound
like a 32' organ pipe.

I think they have been taken over by Ideal now as a few of their models
look exactly like the Ideal Logic range.

Yes, that was several years back.

http://www.idealheating.com/products/logic-combi.php

http://www.keston.co.uk/our-products/c-range/30c/

The Celsius 25 has been superseded by the Q28 but I haven't heard much
about them.

The Celsius 25 was their first domestic sized condensing boiler.
(They had done condensing boilers for some years, but only large
industrial ones.) The Celsius 25 design came from a hugarian
company they took over, IIRC. It was one of the few in UK which had
a stainless steel heat exchanger at the time. Other domestic ones
in the UK at the time were mostly aluminium heat exchangers which
quickly corroded, or convention boilers with later design mods to
add a secondary condensing heat exchanger, which could not operate
as flexibly, and turned out to be very unreliable and vanished from
the market quite quickly.

The Keston was relatively simple, designed as a condenser from the
outset, and quite cheap. There were a number of design issues, none
major, and Keston did fix them through the sales life of the boiler.

The Eco-Hometec (?) appeared afterwards, which Andy Hall fitted.
This was a more complex boiler capable of more automation, but it
cost 3 times as much. I might have gone for it if it had been
around a year earlier.

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