Ariston Boilers

Ariston E-Combi Evo

Our local plumbing merchants often do breakfast mornings, an event cunningly designed to entice the innocent heating engineer into a chat with one of the many UK plumbing manufacturers. 

The lure is usually a sausage sandwich so, being a sucker for such wonders, I duly ended up in conversation with the rep from Ariston. To be honest I didn’t even know Ariston did boilers but after a brief natter I was left wondering why we hadn’t been fitting them. After all they seemed well priced and appeared to be good quality but - and here’s the numb of the problem for the less well known manufacturers - my first thought was, ‘why change?’

This got me thinking about why I was so conservative about the boilers we recommend and, having had my ponder, I figured that it really boiled down to the following criteria:

How easy is it going to be to sell this boiler?

If the boiler comes with a great reputation then, occasionally, it might be able to sell itself. Sadly, most customers struggle to tell the difference between a quality boiler and a bag of nails, so the usual deciding factor is price and if your quote is more expensive than everybody else’s because you’re promoting an expensive boiler you will struggle to win business. So most installers will look for a boiler that is competitively priced.

Another factor that helps sell a boiler is warranty. If boiler A comes with a 2 year warranty whilst boiler B comes with 5 years it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which is the better buy. A long warranty is also a help to the installer in that it suggests that the manufacturer is not expecting many problems within that warranty period – otherwise they’d have to put up the price of the boiler to cover the cost of the warranty. So both installer and customer are comforted by a nice long warranty period.

How reliable is this boiler going to be?

A strong counter to the first point is reliability. Many people forget that the party most affected by an unreliable boiler is the installer. Assuming he or she is not one of these ‘fly-by-night’ outfits that disappears from sight the moment the cheque clears, it is the installer who’ll be called out to investigate any problems - even if the boiler is still under warranty - and the installer who’s reputation will be badly tarnished if the boiler turns out to be as reliable as a political manifesto.

How easy is it going to be to install?

Again, if you’re going to win business, you’re going to have to give a competitive quote and one of the biggest price factors is the length of time it’s going to take to complete the install.

Initially this means how good is the installation manual because, if this is the first time you’ve installed this type of boiler, you are going to have to refer to the literature. Once you’re familiar with the boiler the odds are that the manuals will barely see the light of day and it will all come down to what the manufacturers have provided to make the job of installation quick and easy.

The trouble is that until you’ve actually installed the new boiler you can’t be sure of many of these points and so, unless the manufacturer makes a total mess of things, you tend stick with what you know.... Unless the customer buys the boiler and you just fit it!

As luck would have it a customer of ours did just this and soon found himself the proud owner of an Ariston E-Combi 38. Well this seemed like an ideal opportunity to test them out – if it worked, great, if it turned out to be a heap of rubbish we hadn’t bought it, we hadn’t even recommended it... so it wasn’t our fault.

Well I’m happy to report that it all turned out well – as least so far. The installation manual was pretty good so the basic install went ok. We had a problem with the blow-off connector, which wouldn’t fit anything we had. I assumed it was one of those strange foreign fittings but it turns out it was just a dud batch that would only work after you’d spent half-an-hour paring them down with a flat file.

It didn’t come with any pre-formed copper fittings for the main inlet and outlets pipes so you had to manually cut lengths of tube and fit elbows to them. This is no great shame but after you’ve been fitting Logic+ boilers it felt like a bit of a bind.

The manual asked that you fit the condensate pipework into a tundish and that you fitted a trap in the pipework, both of which seemed a bit odd and outdated. The end result was that the condensate pipework was strangely noisy.

On the plus side it came with an inbuilt timer and filling loop. What’s more (Ideal take note) you could actually see the pressure gauge on the front of the boiler!

The commissioning process was fairly neat, once we’d figured out that the button they constantly referred to as “Esc” in the manual isn’t actually labelled that on the boiler - it’s a circle with an arrow on it! In fact the installer interface is very comprehensive, allowing you to adjust the boiler heat output and play around with umpteen settings so as to maximise the efficiency.

I suppose the obvious downside to this is that the engineer gets put off by the threat of maths and ignores this section all together. However, Ariston will actually send out one of their own engineers to walk you through this process and, if you feel it’s all getting far too technical, the boiler comes with an “Auto Function”.

Most boilers just blast out as much heat as they can muster when the CH is first switched on, which wastes a lot of energy. With the Ariston you can just press this nice, non- threatening, “Auto Function” button and the boiler will immediately start to learn the heating characteristics of your home and central heating system. Once it’s worked these out it will operate the boiler at the lowest settings required to get your home nice and warm within a reasonably period of time but without wasting fuel. The auto-function can also be used with a weather compensation control to increase efficiencies still further.

All in all they seem to be remarkably good boilers, very reasonably priced. All we have to hope for now is that they are also very reliable. The fact that the “Clas” range comes with a 5 year warranty would suggest that Ariston at least think they are.

A Good Old Moan

And another thing! Get your bloody hair cut!

I turned 50 last week. Few benefits accrue from such ancientness but there is one; I am now honour bound to become a grumpy old git.

With that in mind let’s have a good old moan.

First off, business email accounts! We get about 60 emails a day and my email software battles valiantly to filter out the wheat from the chaff yet, despite thousands of blocks and filters, at least 95% of the emails that arrive can best be described as ‘useless bollocks’. For every email from an existing or potential customer there are legions of them trying to flog me crap that I really don’t want. A large proportion of these are from numpties who think that because we bought a van a few years ago we’ll want to buy another very soon. So, in order not to miss their opportunity, they send me the details of vans I don’t want every. Single. Bloody. Day!  Even more annoying than those wankers are the prats that send me junk emails asking if I’ll like to buy their wonderful databases. Why? So I can send out my own junk email and irritate the pants off millions of other email users!

And another thing! Who was the genius at the spare parts company that decided to send out an email telling me about their “Top 10 most popular spare parts”? I can see the point of someone like Amazon sending out a list of their top selling books or games but why would anyone buy a spare part just because it was popular?

“Yes, I was going to order that gas valve for your broken Alpha boiler but when I went on-line I noticed that the fan assembly for a Worcester was immensely popular, so I decided to buy one of those instead!... Woolly jumpers are very popular at the moment..."

Designers! Especially those that design bathroom stuff. You know the thing, the beautiful, elegant tap that took 12 hours to fit, still wobbles and can’t fill a bath in much under 2 days. I can forgive the frilly cuffs and the long curly hair but it really pisses me off when someone thinks design is solely about form and nothing to do with function. To add insult to injury they then cart these things out the door with an installation pamphlet that reads “To install, turn water off and fit.” There’s one company, that will remain nameless only because I can’t afford a lawyer, whose installation guide says little beyond “Ensure that this product is fitted by a NVQ Level 3 qualified plumber”. You could have amassed 33 lives and fought your way through to NVQ Level 9 and you’d still be left frothing in fury at the stupidity of some of their designs. What the leaflet should read is:

“This product should only be fitted by a fully qualified plumber with unfettered access to NASA, MIT and the spirit of Isambard Kingdom Brunel”

Last, and by no means least, are those customers who know best. We don’t actually have any clients like this for what are probably fairly obvious reasons. However, we have had our brushes with these people. 

We had a woman who could barely spell her own name yet lectured us at length because we’d fitted her taps with the cold on the right and the hot on the left when she knew for a fact that it should have been the other way around. And why did she know this? Because she had a very good friend who was an exceptionally good plumber. Strangely enough this very good friend never, ever, had any time to do any plumbing for her. Odd that!

I have sat and listened whilst a guy told me exactly what the problem was, exactly how to fix it, exactly how long that would take and exactly how much he should be charged. Bizarrely enough the only thing he didn’t seem to understand was why I shook his hand, wished him good luck and left.

O'Keeffe's Working Hand Cream

A manly pot of hand cream

Most plumbers like to talk, in fact I suspect some enjoy it more than plumbing. Yet, within in that broad, eclectic, lexicon of learned conversations, I have never come across a single one that dwelt on the wonders of moisturising cream!

Now some may say that that’s no real surprise, after all plumbing is still a male dominated industry and men are not renowned for their fascination for hand cream. However, plumbing, building and most of the other trades can create havoc with hands and most tradesmen seem to have some level of dermatitis, usually in the form of cracks in the skin at the end of their fingers. At best this is uncomfortable; at worse it’s downright painful.

So it was with relief and some surprise that I discovered O’Keeffe’s Working Hand cream propping up the counter at our local Travis Perkins.

“What the bloody hell are you doing selling moisturiser?” Was my first, and I thought fairly obvious, question.

“I don’t know” was the reply, “We got some in from God-knows-where and they’ve been racing off the shelf every since. It’s very good I hear!”

So, being a sucker for the hard sell I bought a jar... and it is very good.

As you might imagine from the name it’s not designed for wishy-washy-girlie types, so there’s no essence of Ylang-ylang - whatever the hell that is. It’s just a plain old fashioned white cream with no scent and the consistency of lard. But it does work really well and after only a few days my finger tips are markedly better.

But that’s not actually the reason I bought it. No, being a modern, trendy, plumber I turn up to a fire or boiler service these days with a PC tablet loaded with most of the world’s boiler and gas fire manuals. This is supremely handy but has one drawback; these new touch screens rely on your fingers actually having a bit of moisture in them and after a hard weeks plumbing mine often don’t.

There are few things more annoying than not being able to load a service manual because the bloody screen refuses to accept that you are actually prodding it with a genuine finger. Fortunately those frustrations are now behind me as, after applying this cream to my hands every evening, I can pick and flick through boiler manuals with ease.

Alas, it hasn’t helped with my Angry Birds score but I guess there’s only so much you can expect from a cream.

PS: I have just discovered that my wife has been nicking this cream from me and applying it to her eczema with apparently marvellous results.

Tradesman morality

Money, what a drag..

Last week David Gauke pronounced that it was immoral to pay tradesmen in cash.

I confess to being a little peeved at this statement. Not because he doesn’t have a point but because a lesson on morality from a politician is like being lectured to by a sewer rat on the virtues of good hygiene. What makes it even harder to take is when that self same politician attempted to avoid stamp duty and fees on the purchase of his second home by claiming them back off the taxpayer to the tune of £10,248.32. That he saw nothing immoral in his own actions but sees immorality everywhere else speaks volumes about the man.

That said I guess he does have a point in that some of that cash probably won’t go through the ‘books’  and as a result HMRC might be down by as much as a few quid. And that is why it was such a pointless statement to make; the sums involved are so utterly trivial when compared to the large corporate tax ‘avoidance’ schemes that plague this country.

If tradesmen had their wits about them they would be scoffing at such minor sleight of hand. Instead they’d be spending everyday at hard graft within their local communities and then declaring to the tax man that all that money was actually earnt by the missus, who is currently sunning herself on a beach in Monaco and is therefore exempt from UK tax.

If the lady of the house is allergic to sun, sea and sand they could always opt for the corporate classic of running most of your business through the UK but then insisting that, despite an enormous head office that’s sited in what looks suspiciously like London, your actual base of operations is a small, bijou, maisonette in downtown Luxembourg. Where by happy chance you pay a heavily discounted level of corporation tax.

If this all sounds too complicated why not just claim that the cash was actually a loan that, for some wholly unexplained reason, doesn’t have to be paid back!

Of course tradesmen don’t get involved in such shenanigans, partly because they don’t make enough money to warrant such deviousness but mainly because they tend to have a much firmer grasp of morality than those people running this country.

Of course there are exceptions. There are people who set themselves up on the sly, don’t register their business with the tax man and hide all of their earnings under the mattress. However, to describe these fly-by-night operators as tradesmen is like describing a politician as honest. In fact these are the people that ruin the reputation of the trades and under-cut honest businesses with their cheap, shoddy work. 

As such I’m more than happy for the chaps down at HMRC to track these people down and throw the book at them... with one caveat; when you do so could you please stop saying that you’ve caught a “plumber” or an “Electrician”. You haven’t! You’ve caught a fraudster who’s been masquerading as a tradesman.

Magnaclean problems

I like Adey, they always seem keen to help and their products are invariably great. Sadly though, things seem to be on the wane.

When you install a new boiler the manufacturers like to see the CH system thoroughly cleaned out, a task that can often take as long as the boiler installation itself. So to streamline the process we recently bought a Adey Magnacleanse, which is a much quicker way of cleaning the gunk out of an old CH system.

The Magnacleanse has been working brilliantly and we have absolutely no problems with it at all. However, the easiest way of using the Magnacleanse is to first fit a Magnaclean unit to the CH system, and sadly the Magnaclean has been letting us down left, right and centre.

The first one we fitted couldn’t be isolated! No matter what we did with the isolation valves we couldn’t get them both to close. This is an essential requirement if you want to use the Magnacleanse or add inhibitor to the system. We were rather keen to do both and so were doubly frustrated. So that unit went back and was replaced.

A few weeks later and we pressurise the CH only to discover a fine spray of water gushing from the Maganaclean. This time the problem was caused by a split in one of the copper fittings that comes with the unit and so we had to drain the system, remove the fitting and replace it.

This week’s problem was minor in comparison but seems to speak volumes about the direction in which the Magnaclean is heading – I opened the little plastic bag in which the valves arrive only to discover that washers had only been supplied for one of the valves. So I had to drive back to the merchants and get them to open up a new Magnaclean so I could nick a washer.

Of course we could be just having a spate of very poor luck but I think not. I suspect that in an endeavour to keep the price of the Magnaclean down in the face of growing competition corners have been cut. 

Adey don’t strike me as the sort of company that would let this continue for any length of time so, hopefully we’ll see some improvements over the coming months – I certainly hope so.

Ecobuild 2012

Every year Ecobuild gets that little bit bigger. The days of being able to house the entire event in one hall of Earls court are but a distant memory, in fact this year you could walk for about 3 miles through the exhibition hall and see nothing but companies selling photovoltaic cells.

It’s amazing what a little government incentive can do to a technology - which makes it even more of a shame that the Renewable Heat Incentive seems to be progressing with all the pace of an elderly snail, with asthma, angina and a bad limp. 

  

Sadly, as a plumber I’m not really into photovoltaic cells, although there were some neat innovations – a solar cell set into a film of plastic that could be fitted to clothing was one of the best. It’d be neat to be able to re charge your photo batteries as you wander the countryside.

One of the best of the plumbing innovations was Stelrad’s new “Radical” radiator range – which I’ll be mentioning in later blogs. In short, we haven’t fitted any yet but we will definitely be opting for these for our next new build.

Another innovative area was internal and external wall insulation - The “Green Deal”, which starts in Aug 2012, will apparently cover this area, although no one seemed quite sure. This is especially handy for older properties (Pre 1920) where external walls are solid brick. In this instance the idea is that you stick foam insulation over the wall then cover this with a weather proof finish. If you don’t fancy changing the outside of your house you can fit internal insulation against your external walls, which can be as simple as putting up thermal wall paper.

To be honest the only real problem with Ecobuild was the fact that it was so huge. I was absolutely knackered by the time I left. As I collapsed onto the Docklands light railway I reflected on the irony; here’s a venue crammed full of energy saving experts and not a single bloody one of them has figured out an energy efficient way of getting about the place!