The weather turned cold in November 2009 and our boiler stopped working due to the two port valve packing up and we got a local company to give us a price to replace the valve. But unfortunately for us we got too impatient due to freezing at home and we called in npower as well to quote for a new boiler assuming you are safer with a big name. HOW WRONG WE WERE!

Sadly we have learned only in hindsight about npower's deceitful sales tactics and their one size fits all approach with boilers and installations.

Npower were very quick to send round the sales consultant who turned up in a stylish Mercedes. He was an elderly gentleman who said he'd had his own central heating business for years and with his grandfatherly manner he gained our complete confidence. We believed him when he said our boiler was extremely wasteful of gas and so this was costing us money and that spare parts were no longer being made for it and therefore we should not waste time in going for a new boiler especially as there was the government incentive at the time. We trusted him as an expert and believed him to be sincere when he said repeatedly he was going to see to it that we would get a job done which would give us an "amazing" improvement in our central heating system.

During the installation the engineers went on the whole time about npower's customer complaints and what rubbish the boilers were and what an awful company they were!! We thought they were just a couple of blokes who were fed up with their job and their employers. But the extent to which they were running down the Company was almost amusing. Ironically we had no idea, yet!

We still were not alarmed when the electrician connected up the boiler and switched it on, because OMG! it was like a jet engine! The engineers said that's what they were like but the electrictian said it was because it was firing up from cold. This was the first sign that the boiler is rubbish.

The noise is unbearable when we sit at our kitchen table, the radiators are either baking hot or they cool down completely, throughout the house some radiators are randomly cold. We had a leak coming dangerously throught the hall light. The timer is not fixed properly to the wall but doesn't work anyway. They came back to rectify the problems and put in a bigger gas feed pipe but because the boiler would have had to come out this was installed down the outside of the boiler and is on show, like a bad DIY job.

The installation was completed on Friday and we complained on Monday by speaking to someone called John Senior and though he said he would see to it that we were entirely satisfied with the job we never heard from him again. This was Novembe 2009. We never paid the bill because we asked for a better quality boiler and for them to also rectify the botched pipework, the flue which emits steam onto the soffit boards, the timer, but they will not and for the last year or so have put the matter with an unscrupulous debt collection company. We are prepared to answer in court as to why we haven't paid.