British Gas Homecare - Beware (British Gas HomeCare)

Member Name: Machair1

Product:	British Gas HomeCare
Date:	14/10/08 (897 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Peace of mind as long as you have a young boiler

Disadvantages: They refuse to cover perfectly functional ageing boilers

We have resigned from the British Gas homecare scheme and I will explain why.

First of all I would like to say that if your boiler is under 10 years old and you want the peace of mind of having a scheme which you can call upon to service your boiler and to attend to it when it breaks down it may be for you. If you have an older boiler please think twice.

We have a Potterton Netaheat and it has been a good boiler over the years though we have had many of the parts replaced. When the boiler was 10 years old about 5 years ago when we were still with British Gas Homecare we started getting letters from them telling us that availability of the parts to fix breakdowns of this model were getting harder to obtain and in some cases manufacturing had stopped altogether. As a busy mum of 4 at the time I didn't think much of it until two events happened. Firstly I went to have coffee with some friends of mine who read the Daily Telegraph each day. When I told them about my British Gas letters they opened their paper and showed me an article which you can still read on line at
www.telegraph.co.uk/property/main.jhtml?xml=/prop erty/2003/01/08/pjeff08.xml

In this article it described exactly what had happened to me and that parts were freely available for these models.

Secondly the engineer from British Gas arrived to do my annual inspection and told me the boiler was dangerous and he stuck a notice on it saying "too dangerous to use" and said he would send round a sales person to help us choose a new one. This worried me as no way was I going to use a dangerous boiler so we called two plumbers out to check this out. Both said the boiler was fine it just needed a new part from Potterton which was easily obtained and would cost less than £100 to fix.

This was 5 years ago and the boiler is working fine and is now serviced by local plumbers. Yes it is not going to last forever and we are going to replace it in due course for a more energy efficient model in our time and when we can afford it. To combat the problem of breakdown we have added a small fee to our home contents policy which covers us for this at a much cheaper price and we pay for servicing independently.

I do not trust British Gas at all and feel I was about to be sold something which was not necessary at that point in time. We actually had gone as far as booking up companies to give us quotes and British Gas were going to be the most expensive option.

If boilers are dangerous of course they must be disconnected but we feel we were misled and still have a very good working boiler 5 years on from that day when it was pronounced dead.

Summary: Not worth considering unless your boiler is brand new