Central heating boilers

[SteveD]

We are going to have the central heating and hot water boilers replaced. Does anyone have any comments about the merits (relative quality and/or reliability) of VAILLANT, VIESSMANN and WEISHAUPT boilers?

[milliezoe]

Been a heating engineer many years would go for the Vaillant every time if thats what you are looking at . Have you considered Worcestors they are excellent and you will recoup your outlay in fuel savings within 3/4 years
Make sure you use a Corgi registered fitter and get more than one quote
Happy to offer any help you require

Happy new year

[rabbitygirl]

SteveD. I will relate what happened to me when I had a combi installed in October. Soon after fitting we were experiencing explosive ignition. No one seemed able to find out what the problem was. Eventually someone decided to check our gas supply. We, presume everyone, should have around 20 milibars coming in and we had between 12 and 15.

Combis are fuel efficient but use a lot of gas to initially fire. More than is needed to fire up a conventional boiler. Therefore it is not noticed until a combi goes in that the gas pressure is low.

We had a bad weld and too tight a bend in the gas pipe leading into the house. This needed 2 separate dig ups, mainly because after the 1st dig Transco didn't check we had only had the 1 fault.

It is probably a rare event but I do not wish on anyone the stress and aggro we went thru for some weeks before this was resolved. The boiler is running perfectly well now but even up to 10 days before Xmas I thought I would have to cancel our family Xmas. Happy New Year.

[gucciman]

ive never heard of the second two but vaillants are excellent boilers, the finest german engineering, very reliable. the older vaillants have a reputation for being over engineered and hard to fix, thats mainly because few people understand how they work. the newer vaillants don't have that problem however and vaillant run excellent training courses so more heating engineers know how to repair them.
worcester bosch also make excellent boilers and their greenstar range are often regarded as the best available.
my father who is also my boss was the main combi boiler expert at british gas for many years and then became a repair agent for vaillant and he would reccomend them everytime

[gucciman]

oh and rabbitygirl, your installer should have checked the operating pressures of your boiler (and the working pressure at the meter if neccesary) when the boiler was being commissioned.

[gucciman]

oh yes i should have said, when your choosing a boiler you need to think carefully about the power rating of the boiler i.e. the kilowatts or kw.
most central heating systems, providing its not a huge house, can be run off a relatively low powered boiler, lets say 24kw, the bulk of the power of a boiler is used for the hot water i.e. the higher the kw of the boiler the faster the delivery of hot water you will get. if you buy an underpowered boiler then you may find that you have to run a bath really slowly to get the water hot enough and then it takes so long to fill that the water is cold before you get into it. the downside is the higher the power output the more expensive it is to buy and run.
you need to get this sorted from the begining or you could end up unhappy. for an average 3 bed semi with perhaps 3 hot water outlets i would have thought a minimum of 28kw would be needed and preferably 30kw. you need to dscuss this with your installer.

[terence7556]

valliant top quality other 2 never heard of.
which o7 sep i think has a good boiler report, with a baxi potterton top. this report is free at your library but be aware it is not written by installers

[gucciman]

i would be wary of baxi combis. baxi have not been making combis for as long as many of the other manufacturers so you could consider them as relatively inexperienced at it. they are prob best known for their baxi back boilers which were the best on the market, and as the demand as fallen for these old style boilers they have had to go into the combi market. recently we had to attend to 4 broken baxi combis in the same week (all the same model) something unheard of from vaillant or worcester
vaillants and worcesters are more expensive than say a heatline (turkish) or a ferroli (italian) but you get what you pay for.