Hi – forgive me if the length of this post and if it demonstrates my ignorance of central heating matters, but I am new here and getting very confused! – partly by the conflicting information various trades people have told me about my new system – I have been searching this forum’s past posts & have not found any answers – but that could be because I haven’t recognised them!?!
Here goes – We have been renovating our 200+ year old property for the past 12 months and have encountered our fair share of problems – The one that is causing most grief at the moment is the central heating – Work began on this almost 12 months ago, when the plumber we employed began ripping out the old system – thank goodness for our two log burning stoves (Hetas registered installer & no gripes there!). We have an oil fired system with a Worcester Bosch Greenstar Camray 18/25 boiler which was recommended by the (original) plumber & our builders merchant, it runs 11 radiators (5 being largish Hudson Reed narrow but double vertical) and a small towel rail + a Megaflo unvented mains pressure water heater tank in the loft and is controlled via Horstmann Centaur+ C21 programmer and a room thermostat. The oil tank is also new (Titan) and as the outlet is approx 12-18 inches below the boiler burner, we opted for a Tigerloop de-aerator.
The initial plumber seemed to be doing Ok until it came to hanging the vertical radiators – I was concerned to see that the concealed pipe work was obviously not going to correspond with the radiator dimensions – but on pointing this out I was reassured that they would be fine! Then one of the radiators, weighing some 40 Kg fell off the wall – fortunately no one was near it! I was told we had the wrong kind of walls! Finally the (expensive) new boiler arrived – and was promptly dismantled and screws & fittings etc left all over the debris strewn kitchen floor – I’m afraid I decided it was time to act, but could not contact the plumber, only to be told by the builder, who had introduced us to the him, that he had had some unspecified type of breakdown and would not be coming back! I later heard he was in fact working on other projects, but unfortunately we had been paying him on a labour basis and being up to date with his payments, there was no leverage there – he simply seemed to no longer want the job.
In the end I had to refit all the vertical radiators to the walls myself as they were unsafe and we eventually managed to employ another well-known local firm and paid to have all the plumbing to them put right. The boiler had to be stripped, checked and re-fitted and we were told it would have apparently leaked badly as it was incorrectly fitted - also the “new” pipe work for the oil supply all had to be ripped out and replaced. Unfortunately this new firm seemed to be very busy and we had to wait for weeks at a time for them to re-appear to finish work that they had agreed to do, so it was not until November that the system was finally switched on. It also transpired that they were not Oftec registered, which I had been led to believe they were, so I had to pay £300 extra for a registered engineer they knew to come in to sign off the system. Finally they were not certified to install the electrics required for the programmer etc, so this was down to our electrician who was re-wiring the house – which when things started to go wrong, led to the classic situation of them blaming each other for the problems.
To try and keep this post a bit shorter! The current situation is that we owe the (second) plumber a sizable amount of money, which we have refused to pay until we are satisfied that everything is working OK. This has just recently led to him finally agreeing to accompany the electrician to sort out the problems - he had arranged for the electrician to come to sort out the problems on a previous occasion (unsuccessfully), as he (the plumber) stated that they were all due to the electrics:
· The Hot water and heating could not be operated at the same time – the hot water had to be switched off to get the heating to function.
· The room thermostat only triggered the heating if turned up to maximum temperature.
· When hot water only was selected, two radiators became very hot as well – the others all remained cold.
· The upstairs radiators needed continually bleeding
The final problem turned out to be a compression joint in the loft that had not been tightened – I ended up tracing this and sorting it out myself. Also the oil supply to the boiler failed and it took him four weeks to attend to this, claiming it was a new fault and not due to his installation work, therefore suggesting we got another plumber in to fix it. I found information on this forum that suggested it was air entering the system on the pump side and therefore was an installation fault that only became apparent as the oil level dropped and when I put this to him he agreed to fix it.
The result of this final visit was that all the problems were put down to a faulty room thermostat, which was replaced and we are now being pursued “strongly” for the payment.
· However, the heating still doesn’t function if the hot water is on, but we have been now told this is normal on this system as the hot water takes priority.
· The same two radiators still warm up if the system is on “hot water only”, but now only seem to get luke-warm.
· The only documentation I have is the CD/10T “Oil firing installation completion report” on which I note that the “Oftec oil pipe installation guidance complied with” box is not ticked and there is a note that this pipe is “not to depth or ducted”
Am I being unreasonable? or am I being “spun a yarn” over the operation of this system? The old system certainly could run heating and hot water at the same time! Also should I not have some sort of Oftec certificate, like the Hetas certificates I was given for our log stoves? Is this note on the "certificate" going to cause me problems if I ever get to the stage of getting the building regs signed off?
I realise that professionals on here will probably not want to comment on a dispute involving one of their own? But I really need to know what I should expect from this all new system!
Here goes – We have been renovating our 200+ year old property for the past 12 months and have encountered our fair share of problems – The one that is causing most grief at the moment is the central heating – Work began on this almost 12 months ago, when the plumber we employed began ripping out the old system – thank goodness for our two log burning stoves (Hetas registered installer & no gripes there!). We have an oil fired system with a Worcester Bosch Greenstar Camray 18/25 boiler which was recommended by the (original) plumber & our builders merchant, it runs 11 radiators (5 being largish Hudson Reed narrow but double vertical) and a small towel rail + a Megaflo unvented mains pressure water heater tank in the loft and is controlled via Horstmann Centaur+ C21 programmer and a room thermostat. The oil tank is also new (Titan) and as the outlet is approx 12-18 inches below the boiler burner, we opted for a Tigerloop de-aerator.
The initial plumber seemed to be doing Ok until it came to hanging the vertical radiators – I was concerned to see that the concealed pipe work was obviously not going to correspond with the radiator dimensions – but on pointing this out I was reassured that they would be fine! Then one of the radiators, weighing some 40 Kg fell off the wall – fortunately no one was near it! I was told we had the wrong kind of walls! Finally the (expensive) new boiler arrived – and was promptly dismantled and screws & fittings etc left all over the debris strewn kitchen floor – I’m afraid I decided it was time to act, but could not contact the plumber, only to be told by the builder, who had introduced us to the him, that he had had some unspecified type of breakdown and would not be coming back! I later heard he was in fact working on other projects, but unfortunately we had been paying him on a labour basis and being up to date with his payments, there was no leverage there – he simply seemed to no longer want the job.
In the end I had to refit all the vertical radiators to the walls myself as they were unsafe and we eventually managed to employ another well-known local firm and paid to have all the plumbing to them put right. The boiler had to be stripped, checked and re-fitted and we were told it would have apparently leaked badly as it was incorrectly fitted - also the “new” pipe work for the oil supply all had to be ripped out and replaced. Unfortunately this new firm seemed to be very busy and we had to wait for weeks at a time for them to re-appear to finish work that they had agreed to do, so it was not until November that the system was finally switched on. It also transpired that they were not Oftec registered, which I had been led to believe they were, so I had to pay £300 extra for a registered engineer they knew to come in to sign off the system. Finally they were not certified to install the electrics required for the programmer etc, so this was down to our electrician who was re-wiring the house – which when things started to go wrong, led to the classic situation of them blaming each other for the problems.
To try and keep this post a bit shorter! The current situation is that we owe the (second) plumber a sizable amount of money, which we have refused to pay until we are satisfied that everything is working OK. This has just recently led to him finally agreeing to accompany the electrician to sort out the problems - he had arranged for the electrician to come to sort out the problems on a previous occasion (unsuccessfully), as he (the plumber) stated that they were all due to the electrics:
· The Hot water and heating could not be operated at the same time – the hot water had to be switched off to get the heating to function.
· The room thermostat only triggered the heating if turned up to maximum temperature.
· When hot water only was selected, two radiators became very hot as well – the others all remained cold.
· The upstairs radiators needed continually bleeding
The final problem turned out to be a compression joint in the loft that had not been tightened – I ended up tracing this and sorting it out myself. Also the oil supply to the boiler failed and it took him four weeks to attend to this, claiming it was a new fault and not due to his installation work, therefore suggesting we got another plumber in to fix it. I found information on this forum that suggested it was air entering the system on the pump side and therefore was an installation fault that only became apparent as the oil level dropped and when I put this to him he agreed to fix it.
The result of this final visit was that all the problems were put down to a faulty room thermostat, which was replaced and we are now being pursued “strongly” for the payment.
· However, the heating still doesn’t function if the hot water is on, but we have been now told this is normal on this system as the hot water takes priority.
· The same two radiators still warm up if the system is on “hot water only”, but now only seem to get luke-warm.
· The only documentation I have is the CD/10T “Oil firing installation completion report” on which I note that the “Oftec oil pipe installation guidance complied with” box is not ticked and there is a note that this pipe is “not to depth or ducted”
Am I being unreasonable? or am I being “spun a yarn” over the operation of this system? The old system certainly could run heating and hot water at the same time! Also should I not have some sort of Oftec certificate, like the Hetas certificates I was given for our log stoves? Is this note on the "certificate" going to cause me problems if I ever get to the stage of getting the building regs signed off?
I realise that professionals on here will probably not want to comment on a dispute involving one of their own? But I really need to know what I should expect from this all new system!
