Recently I attended a boiler service in Crowthorne, close to Wokingam, for an old friend. Initially, everything looked good and the boiler had been installed about 9 years ago. Upon closer inspection, numerous installation errors and faults were exposed. Most worrying was there was a lot of rust on the boiler case. It seemed to stem from a leak on one of the flow pipes. It had however, dried - I guess from the limescale hardening. I cleaned it all off and saw that the rust was luckily only on the case, not the burner. Next thing that was wrong was that the magnetic filter had been fitted horizontally. This meant that when opening the magnetic filter, all the water poured out.
There were two other faults in this poor boiler installation - the condensate pipe terminated outside - just dripped on the ground. Bare in mind that condensate is slightly acidic! And there was not equipotential bonding on the gas pipe.
While none of these faults were drastic, when doing a simple service, sometimes a can of worms can be opened up and then its my job to give the customer the bad news. The difficulty comes in when its an old boiler installation 'it's been like that for years'. The boiler could have been installed years ago, but it does not make it right! Its also difficult to spend money on putting it right when it's working fine. That is the quandary!
