Using a Local reputable tradesperson vs a national boiler installation company

Firstly, I want to highlight that I am not writing this in any way to slander any companies out there as i’m sure there will be some national companies that do a good job, I am writing this based on personal interactions with customers over the last couple of years and I have been prompted to write this by an absolutely terrible installation I came across very recently.

I think it’s important to start with some of the key differences between a local reputable installer like ourselves and a national boiler installation company (I'll refer to these as ‘nationals’ for the remainder of this case study).
If the nationals are charging £500 less than a local tradesperson, this raises the question of why?

Here are a few examples why:

- They are likely saving money on the installation cost, meaning they will send whoever accepts their offer of £150 a day to install the boiler.

- They are likely to use substandard materials. We pipe virtually everything in copper unless for a specific reason plastic is needed (Going through joists, under walls under a floor etc). I almost guarantee that they will be throwing everything in, in cheap plastic speedfit pipe.

- Condensate pipes should go through external walls in 1 ¼” pipe to stop them freezing up in the winter months causing boilers to go into lockout, these nationals will probably put it through the wall in 22mm plastic pipe to save coring out a bigger hole, this will likely freeze causing you to need to pay callout fees when snow starts to fall.

Now in terms of timeframe, a lot of the time if you book in a boiler install with us (Bearing in mind we virtually exclusively work on boilers and have a team of 7) you will need to wait 3-4 weeks as we are always booked up.
If a national can do it in 2-3 days time, again it raises some questions. Why can they get in so quickly?
I know what you’re thinking... they likely have access to thousands of contractors which makes sense that one or two of them will be free to fit the boiler in that time. That’s absolutely a valid point.
However, why are these contractors available when the local reputable companies have a waiting list of 3-4 weeks? Well it may well be that they aren’t that busy, which may suggest that their standard of work isn’t anywhere near what it should be.

So the job that prompted me to write this was a lovely local couple that I went to quote changing their old heating system with a cylinder in an airing cupboard and storage tanks in their loft to a combi boiler, a pretty standard system change. We discussed everything involved in depth and I explained that we would be looking at around a 4-5 week wait to get the work done as it would take around 3 days. The customer was open and said they had been in contact with a national company who could do it in 2 days time.
I had a really honest conversation with the customers about the differences I have noted above and despite not knowing who the company was or what they had been quoted I told him I could almost guarantee we would be at least a few hundred pounds more than what they have quoted as we offer a premium service compared to what they would receive with the other company.

Now the key thing here is that the customer was happy to pay more to use us due to our reputation and the level of detail we go into with our quote, but really wanted the work done sooner and the appeal of not having to wait 4-5 weeks lead them to choose the national company.

Fast forward around a week, I got a phone call from the customer and I genuinely felt bad for them as they apologised for not waiting and using this national company and they’ve had nothing but trouble and now can’t contact them.

So here’s what happened:
2 guys from Leeds turned up on day 1 of the installation in a white unsigned van, they got stuck in to the work in the morning, had their dinner, had another 2-3 hours at it and were away by 3pm.
And that’s it.
Job done, boiler on the wall, never to be seen again.
A job that would take one of our experienced engineers 2.5-3 days with an apprentice took these guys ¾ of a day.
I will attach some pictures and you don’t need to be a heating engineer to know they are completely not how they should be but here is a summary of what happened within a couple of days of them throwing this boiler in and what we found upon going over to see what had gone on.

- The laminate flooring in the kitchen started to squelch as you walked on it and when a piece was taken up, the underlay was sopping wet (The boiler was installed in the garage that backed onto the kitchen).
We investigated and found that the condensate pipe from the boiler was put into the internal stack pipe in the incorrect pipe with a substandard connection so it had popped out and water was running under the laminate (This also left a hole exposed in the stack pipe which is connected to the toilet waste of more than 1 bathroom).

- The old water storage tank in the loft was left up there full of water because removing it would have taken half an hour to drain, cut in half and remove. This literally just leaves water up there to go stagnant and pose a risk of a leak that is just unnecessary.

- Pipes were capped off in the loft with push fit fittings, we would be capping them off with a soldered cap which is a much more permanent solution and poses much less risk of a future leak coming through the ceiling.

- The problem with the bath tap when I originally went over to quote was that it had great pressure on the cold pipe but very poor pressure on the hot tap so the customer would literally take an hour to run a bath. After this install, the hot had great pressure as it should have with a new combi boiler but unfortunately the cold now didn’t.
After we investigated in the loft, the cold pipe hadn’t been connected up correctly.
So now the customer would take 10 minutes to run a bath and wait an hour for it to cool down to a bearable temperature. This shows that the installers didn’t test what they had installed before rushing out of there.

- The condensate pipe was installed and presumably they didn’t measure it right the first time and instead of taking 10 minutes to unclip the pipe, cut it to the correct size and re-do it correctly, they heated it up with their blow lamp to melt it to fit into the pipe.

The airing cupboard where work had taken place was covered in dirt, offcuts of pipe and remnants of cylinder insulation. The old pipe clips were all left in there with holes in the ceiling from where pipes used to go through. Although this doesn’t affect how the boiler works, it shows the level of attention (Or lack of) to detail throughout the job.
The quality of the water they left in the system will be horrendous as I can guarantee they didn’t sufficiently flush the system. This may invalidate the 10 year warranty that the boiler should come with from new but the customer wouldn’t know until something went wrong.
I estimate this boiler would last 4-5 years before faulting if it was left as it was.

The customer contacted the national company to complain and try to get the work rectified.

Their calls were avoided. Their emails were unanswered. Their Facebook messages were unanswered.

We have offered to do a report on the installation as the customer is likely going to have to take legal action to recover their costs to put this horrible installation right.

This isn’t about advertising how good we are at what we do, our work and the recommendations we receive do that for us. I just wanted to highlight that the cheaper and faster options is most definitely not always as good as it seems.

We provide detailed quotes, are available to answer queries, have guarantees in writing on our website, we have a quality assessor that checks every boiler we install and there are so many other benefits of using a local reputable tradesperson. Please don’t fall into the same trap as the lovely couple I've used as an example in this piece as it has caused them so much stress and will continue to, whilst the legal proceedings are ongoing.