Tell me about crappy condensing boilers and builders - the Glow-worm 30CXi

What a piece of crap the Glow-Worm 30CXi is. Actually that's wrong; when it works it's obviously fine. We get hot water and heating. But there is always something wrong with it, always. It ejects water almost daily. That's not right. The pressure within the system also varies wildly, sometimes dropping down to almost atmospheric levels. Wrongness. But my main gripe is that the heat exchange unit fills with crud from the radiators, and then just stops working. There's no filter within the boiler to stop this happening, so after a period of time the heat exchange unit gets blocked and just stops exchanging. It's a very poor design.

But here's the rub. Plumbers. What a bunch of cock heads if ever there were any. All have excellent inter-personal skills but each and every one of them is a) amazingly hard to get hold of and b) expensive. The boiler going is just a problem. Shit happens, get on with it, get it repaired, move on for a year until it happens again. But what causes me the stress is knowing I have to spend two days trying to find a plumber, and then once I've found one, not knowing how much the git is going to charge - always north of £300 no matter what. This to fix a boiler B & Q probably sell for £500. I call around the plumbers and get various responses, usually based around whether or not they charge a call out fee. I'll not pay this - they want £75 for getting into their vans? To fix a known fault with this boiler? Bollocks to that.

And all those Assured Trader schemes are a waste of time. My local one, for example, doesn't cover goods or services. That's great isn't it? I can't for the life of me imagine a poorer scheme. And the rest are all paid for through trader subscriptions. In other words just adverts like any other trade publication. There's no assurance, no guarantee.

So today is spoilt already. Cold shower, yeuk, horrid. I was going to go for a ride, but post ride involves a shower. No way am I going for a 7 degree ride in mud just to have a cold shower afterwards. So my ride is kaput too. And now I have to ring around* a bunch of time wasters in order for them to pop around for ten minutes and land me with a £300 bill to nominally fix a piece of crap.

Days don't get any better do they?

Indeed I'm being mean to plumbers here. Lets stretch it out to all builders shall we? My wife generally does not let me have any contact with them. If she does things usually go like this:

Me: You're late. By two days.

Them: Traffic innit. Any tea?

Me: No. Tell you what, just sod off. I don't want to see you again.


You see how constructive my chats with most builders are? I'm known for being slightly temperamental with them. My wife dealt with one patiently for three months once. One day she was busy and asked me to call him regarding paint colours. It took me less than five minutes to get irritated and throw him off site. Not a hissy fit, come back in ten minutes for a cuddle type thing - I really threw the whole lot off site never to come back. My wife now goes to great lengths to make sure I don't get their telephone numbers.

And we had a roofer around recently; some tiles missing. Bizarrely he didn't blame the weather but the "darkies" for this. Sorry? "You know; the darkies living in the street." Really, going to give trade to a complete racist twat now am I? Beggars belief some of them.

And don't get me started on the "we're not VAT registered" ones who quote £3k for a week's work.


*First question from one already; What's the serial number? Me: I've no idea, where is it? Them; on the boiler. Me; no it's not, nothing there. Them; Sorry, without the number we can't come out. Bye.

Well that's a great start. The number must be stamped onto the boiler frame or such. To get to this I have to partially dismantle the boiler? FFS.

My second point of call was to a web based company. No contact number, please fill in a form and we'll get back to you. Now even whilst I was filling in the form I knew nothing good would come of it. I'm getting on for 50 years old and have owned my own home since I was 25. The web has been around for a good fifteen years now. In all that time no company has ever got back to me following the filling in of an on-line form. I've no idea why they have them other than to waste time.

Ha ha! Third fail. I love the ones where you call, and they have a long options list: Press 1 for.... Now these never, ever work with smart 'phones. What's the point? Anyway finally got through on a normal 'phone - for a mere £300 I can have the boiler fixed with a 12 month guarantee. Ho hum, £300 down as quite frankly I'm depressed by now.

Comments