{"id":3601,"date":"2016-11-19T11:52:43","date_gmt":"2016-11-19T10:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3601"},"modified":"2016-11-19T11:58:15","modified_gmt":"2016-11-19T10:58:15","slug":"a-post-about-boilers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/3601\/","title":{"rendered":"A Post About Boilers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commenter Alex M. chimes in<\/a> under this post<\/a> on the subject of boilers, and I thank him for that:<\/p>\n

My plumber has a handy sideline reselling perfectly good boilers than people replace because they fall for all the guff about modern energy-efficient equipment. New boilers may use slightly less oil but the savings will never cover the cost of replacing an old serviceable boiler, never mind the much higher maintenance costs and the fact that new condensing boilers are only designed to last around ten years. A bog-standard 20th century non-condensing boiler will last fifty years or longer with regular servicing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is probably not surprising that I never owned a property with a boiler until recently. \u00a0My employer has always been generous enough to supply me with accommodation wherever I’ve been posted, and the place I bought in Thailand back in 2009 has nothing more than a small water heater for showers and washing up, for obvious reasons. \u00a0That changed when I bought a\u00a0property in Annecy\u00a0a couple of years ago, a modern\u00a0apartment which was fully electric (i.e. no gas) and independently heated (i.e. unlike the older apartment complexes, there was no centralised heating system for the whole development). \u00a0The boiler was new, so the previous owner told me, and he had receipts to prove it.<\/p>\n

When II collected the keys I\u00a0didn’t even have a place to sit down, and so\u00a0after looking around I switched off the water and the power and went back to Paris. \u00a0That’s one of the advantages of an apartment over a house: you can drop the shutters, switch everything off, and just leave it unattended for months. \u00a0Do that with a house and you’ll find things have gotten inside and taken up residence. \u00a0Anyway, I made a habit of visiting the place every few months and\u00a0then switching everything off when I wasn’t there.<\/p>\n

I arrived at the property on 22nd December last year, intending to spend Christmas there, and found the boiler leaking. \u00a0It wasn’t a bad leak and fortunately there was no damage to my property or that of my neighbour, and I could even still take showers, but something had gone wrong with the boiler. \u00a0I found it odd that the leak wasn’t coming from the bottom, but about halfway up. \u00a0I couldn’t see any hole but I could feel that below the leak the casing was warm, but above it was cold. \u00a0The water was dripping down the inside of the casing.<\/p>\n

My first reaction was to swear loudly. \u00a0This was 3 days before Christmas, remember. \u00a0And plumbers are known to be cheap and readily available, especially with foreigners close to a major holiday, oh yes. \u00a0My second reaction was to pull out the warranty. \u00a0I called the service number and as I was on hold a passage in the warranty terms caught my eye: the warranty is void if the power has been off for more than 24 hours. \u00a0Mine had been off for seven months.<\/p>\n

I’m an engineer, mechanical according to the certificate. \u00a0Not a good one, but an engineer nonetheless. I know about corrosion and how it works. \u00a0I’d suspected the leak was caused by corrosion, but was struggling to figure out how the hull had been breached so fast. \u00a0Now I knew. \u00a0Modern boilers are made from paper-thin steel to save costs, make them lighter, and make them more energy efficient. \u00a0This is inherently sensible. \u00a0The problem is corrosion: even the slightest degradation of thin steel will cause a hole to appear. \u00a0All boilers deal with corrosion by using sacrificial anodes, but they need to be replaced every few years increasing servicing costs. \u00a0You can avoid this by using a powered anode, which does not deteriorate with time but – as the name suggests – needs to be powered. \u00a0When I pulled apart my boiler I found a small 9V battery underneath: that would be the emergency supply\u00a0when the main power is switched off for whatever reason. \u00a0The anode wouldn’t need much power, but a 9V battery is not going to keep it working for seven months. \u00a0As such, the anode stopped working and the boiler itself corroded in short order.<\/p>\n

This all came as a surprise to me. \u00a0The house in which I grew up in rural Wales had a boiler, which from memory was made of steel an inch thick and probably needed a crane to install. \u00a0If the anode lost power there would be enough allowance in the steel to withstand months or even years of corrosion before springing a leak. \u00a0But modern boilers have no such margin, they will be made using thin steel and will become useless at the slightest sign of physical degradation. \u00a0So you have to keep the damned things powered up.<\/p>\n

I was fortunate enough to find a decent plumber in Annecy who replaced it on 23rd December with a better one for 1,200 Euros including installation, taxes, etc. \u00a0It was a bit of a dent in the wallet, but it didn’t mean Christmas was ruined.<\/p>\n

This isn’t a rant about disposable boilers, though. Old-style boilers might last forever, but that comes at a cost too: you need a strong floor to put them on, and you certainly can’t hang them from a wall like you can the modern ones. \u00a0You also can’t install them with one person and another one helping, you’d need some serious kit to move them in and out. \u00a0And they’d also be more expensive to run. \u00a0There is a reason why modern French apartments are all electric: heating technology and insulation has gotten so good that you no longer need a heavy, industrial central heating system or a gas-fired boiler, and all the equipment you need can be bought from a DIY store and chucked in the back of your car (just about). \u00a0In the long run, I suspect the savings on heating costs would easily pay for replacing the boiler once every ten or fifteen years (though perhaps not every seven months).<\/p>\n

But there’s another point, which as an employee of an oil company I understand well: CAPEX versus OPEX. \u00a0Most people would rather pay for a cheap boiler and replace it every ten years – $700 up front, then two $1,000 payments at year 10 and 20 respectively, totalling $2,700 – than pay $2,000 up front on Day 1 and not pay anything for the next 20 years. \u00a0What do economists call it? \u00a0The time value of money, or something.<\/p>\n

And that’s the real benefit of modern boilers: they are cheap according to the price tag hanging off it in the shop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commenter Alex M. chimes in under this post on the subject of boilers, and I thank him for that: My plumber has a handy sideline reselling perfectly good boilers than people replace because they fall for all the guff about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[92,50,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3601"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3601"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3604,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3601\/revisions\/3604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}