Boiler maintenance

Kya deLongchamps continues her series on making your home more energy efficient in the winter.

Only a registered gas installer is allowed to service a gas boiler, while oil burners should also be done by a properly qualified person.

Badly maintained gas boilers are largely blamed for carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, but any fuel burning device has the potential to poison.

AS WE head into the darkest, coldest months, if you haven’t bothered to have your central heating boiler checked, now is the hour. New or old, gas or oil, your boiler should be serviced once a year whether it appears to be working well or not. If the fee is holding you back, keep in mind that an inefficient boiler will be mishandling expensive fossil fuels and wasting as much as 10% of your fuel costs, or €150 in one year. That’s more than the price of a service.

Just cleaning soot and debris off parts of an oil-fed boiler, including the baffles and heat exchanger, can prolong their life and that of the entire boiler which can seize up and need replacing in its entirety if the parts cannot be freed.

Boiler servicing is a specialist area, requiring an understanding of the soundness of a range of elements including electronic, mechanical and electrical elements. Systems boilers have a number of components built into the boiler, including the pump and expansion tank and are complex pieces of equipment with, for instance, sensitive nozzles, photocells and electrodes that can soot up or degrade with normal use.

This kind of work should not be attempted DIY and in fact it is illegal for anyone other than a registered gas installer (RGII) to service a natural gas boiler and for oil, you would be well advised to use a service firm registered with the Oil Firing Technical Association for the Petroleum Industry (OFTEC).

A reputable engineer will make visual checks and running checks of your vents, isolating valves, burners, cowls, flues and heat exchanger, assessing the overall integrity of the boiler, and advising you if they feel the boiler needs replacing. Don’t forget the supply, store and lines to any fuel such as an oil tank during the service call, taking the advice you’re given on the need for upgrades.

You can sign up to an annual contract agreement from most boiler suppliers, including utility companies such as Bord Gáis from around €100 per year. The details of the agreement may or may not include parts and labour on repairs, and parts and labour clauses will have a maximum cover, so read the small print.

Along with reliable heating comes the question of safety. Badly maintained gas boilers are largely blamed for carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, but any fuel burning device has the potential to poison the atmosphere. The physical symptoms of CO in the home are often as subtle as a light recurring headache or light headedness, so you may not realise you even have a problem. CO appears where fossil fuels burn incompletely and the residual gases are released back into the living space. Your engineer will look for any potential problems such as soot or staining developing on vent pipes on the boiler but a CO detector/alarms is the only real protection. They are priced from as little as €20.

* For qualified RGII and OFTEC engineers visit www.rgii.ie and www.oftec.org. The OFTEC advert in the Golden Pages will also direct you to local qualified engineers. Every Irish boiler sold since the last weeks of 2009 should carry a ‘boiler passport’ to show that the boiler has been properly commissioned.