Advice
What a boiler service actually includes, and what a fifteen minute one misses
There is no legal definition of a boiler service, which is why the price ranges from about thirty pounds to well over a hundred and why two of them can look nothing alike.
What we actually do in the hour
- Take the case off and visually inspect the heat exchanger, burner and injectors for corrosion or sooting.
- Clean the condensate trap, which is the single most common cause of a boiler locking out in February.
- Check the gas rate against the manufacturer plate, so the boiler is burning the amount of gas it is designed to.
- Run a flue gas analysis and record the actual combustion figures, not a tick in a box.
- Test the safety devices, the seals and the flue integrity.
- Check system pressure, the expansion vessel charge and the magnetic filter, and clean the filter out.
The expansion vessel is the one that gets skipped
It takes ten minutes and a pump to check and recharge. Skip it for four years and you get a boiler that keeps losing pressure, which most people then pay to have diagnosed as something else entirely.
How to tell what you got
Ask for the flue gas analysis figures. A real service produces numbers: carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide readings and a ratio. If the paperwork has no numbers on it, the front never came off.
Ours is ninety six pounds and takes about an hour. That is not us being expensive, it is the cost of the hour.