14: Replacing the boiler

Finally, after 3 years of increasingly unreliable hot water, our boiler broke enough for the insurance to pay us £500 towards a new one. Hooray!

We found our new boiler and engineer to replace it through the British Gas Local Heroes scheme. Having had such bad luck with the old boiler, the extra guarantees you get for the installation seemed like a  very good idea.

Unfortunately, the first engineer we found through Local Heroes tried to talk us into going behind their backs so he'd get to keep the extra commission. This confused us for long enough that Covid hit us before we were able to get the boiler replaced. 

While my husband was ill, I did some more research online and it seemed like the typical guarantee for boilers only covers manufacturing defects. One of my team mates at work had had a very expensively bad experience with a faulty boiler installation job by a company that went out of business, so I definitely wanted to get the installation work covered too.

It's been a month without hot water, so it's been really nice to have hot baths and showers again, and great that they took the old boiler and other rubbish away, saving us from having to get them to the tip.

Apparently, being more efficient, our new boiler will also be good for our energy bills, so I'm looking forward to that as well.

Hopefully this can bring an end to this unfortunate chapter of life when we had a whole family's worth of Covid, no hot water and (my) sprained ankle all at the same time. Surely better times are just around the corner, or even appearing already!