My boiler hasn’t been working for the last 2 months. First it seemed like the pump had gone, so I spent £90 on Labour and £120 on a new pump… since then the boiler still hasn’t worked. It’s had 3 new pumps (which I haven’t paid for), and a number of new sensors. It would run for a while and then stop, usually next morning, from that point on it would refuse to fire up.
Brian, the boiler man has tried his hardest but to no avail. Finally today SIME, the boiler manufacturer came up with the answer; the boiler was wired up wrong when it was installed 2 years ago! The problem appears to be that there should be a connection between the control unit and the boiler that affectively keeps the boiler constantly live, in standby state if you like. This wire, among others, is missing and thus when the boiler needs to power down it just cuts off rather than going into standby. The affect is that the boiler is being turned on/off many many times a day. This has burnt out the motherboard ( don’t let anyone tell you that standby buttons are bad because they use too much power ) and this now needs replacing along with the new wiring… so it looks like another £250 to get it fixed!
Lost…
Well it’s taken nearly 5 years, but I’ve finally gone and done it… I’ve lost my car key! I have a Renault Laguna II with one of those credit card keys and sometime in the last few days it has dropped out of my pocket. I may have put it down somewhere, but I’ll be jiggered if I know where.
Now, it wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that the spare key is in the car… yes yes, you can stop laughing now… the reason the spare is in the care is quite straight forward and stems back to when I first got the car and the initial unreliability of the keys.
The card has a special hidden emergency key built in, which looks pretty much like a normal key and there is a place on the car that you can use it to unlock the doors. Well early on I had a few problems with a number of the keys losing power and thus not working (design fault I believe), however with the emergency key you could always get in the car and thus with the spare key I could drive my car to the garage to get it fixed!
The keys have since become pretty robust but my habbits haven’t changed. I was only thinking the other day that I should remove the spare from the car and put it back in the house.
So now, the only way to get into the car is for a special emergency key to be cut for me by Renault in France and that takes 5-10 days. Then I can get in the car, get the spare, drive to the garage and have the car reprogrammed for new keys. All at the cost of £150! Not to mention 10 days without my car…
Renault Laguna