I wish it was warm enough – but our boiler still isn’t working!

A quick recap of the chilling tale will show why we’re almost shivering with rage.

It all began last Thursday when the central heating gas boiler went pop. The engineers from the local central heating company came on Friday – thought they’d fixed it but didn’t. Then came the bad news the boiler was beyond repair.

As a special the local central heating company managed to get us a new Baxi Barcelona condensing boiler on Friday for fitting on Saturday.

But all didn’t go according to plan – once fitted it didn’t work – the boiler was faulty.

Of course now the boiler was all plumbed in it wasn’t just a 'whip it out and pop in a new one' job.

The owner of the central heating company himself came on Monday checked it all over and confirmed that the boiler was at fault. So Baxi were called to send an engineer.

They couldn’t send anyone until Wednesday.

Remember we still had no heating or hot water – the pioneer spirit was beginning to wear a bit thin.

The Baxi man came on Wednesday. He rumaged about and poked about, tested and investigated.

"Ah hah! They’ve fitted the live wotsit the wrong way round. It’s a common problem. I’ll soon have it fixed."

[ASIDE – if it’s a common problem why did no one spot it?]

And so he fixed it. And the boiler started. And we got heat and we got hot water.

For an hour. And then it stopped. And so we're just chilling out again.

Now I’m not going to point the finger of blame at any one. Mainly because I don’t know which way to point it.

But I do despair. A gas central heating boiler is not rocket science.

I can video link across the world with a £500 PC and I’m not a computer scientist. Can’t someone fit us a central heating boiler that works?

Is it the manufacture of the boiler that is at fault, is it the training that is lacking or is it just attention to detail?

I wonder how much of this country’s economic activity is spent on correcting mistakes that should never have been made in the first place?

Do we all take as much care about our work as we should? The odd typo here, a missing bolt there, an undercooked chicken on Fridays.