A tale of woe!: Mis-sold solar heating and also problem with plumber

kultofkylie

New Member
Jun 9, 2010
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Hi,

I was looking for some advice to help with a dispute. I own a Glow Worm 30CXI combi boiler which is out of warranty and about six months ago had solar heating installed by a 3rd party company, however I believe that I may have been mis-sold the solar heating system and also have an issue with the plumber having carried out work and taken payment for it even though the fault has not been fixed as a result of the work.

The setup is such that the mains water is passed through a cylinder where it is pre-heated by the solar system. Warm water from the cylinder is then fed to the 30cxi, in theory so that the boiler will not need to use as much gas to raise the water to desired temperature. The sales guy basically said it would be compatible and none of the installation engineers raised any possible problems at the time of the install.

After months of working away quite happily, the boiler has now stopped producing hot water on demand and after replacing the flow diverter and pressure valve without resolving the issue the local plumber that we hired to fix the boiler is now saying that it is not working because the boiler is not compatible with the solar pre-heat. They haven't been able to offer a specific technical explanation for this, however they called the Glow Worm tech support line who advised me verbally that such a setup would not work. Again no specific fault diagnosed - it "just doesn't work".

I now have two separate issues that need to be addressed, the first is that on the follow-up visit after I had called them back the plumber didn't bother to attempt to diagnose the fault in the boiler any further even though the situation hasn't changed since before they charged me £400 to replace the parts which clearly didn't resolve the problem. Unfortunately I wasn't able to supervise the fitting of the parts due to unavoidable work commitments, however it was still left to me to discover that the problem hadn't been fixed and chase the company for it. Also how come they didn't raise the solar compatibility issue before they had quoted for and carried out the work on the flow diverter? It seems like they just took a guess and when it didn't work lost all interest in trying to resolve the problem as they had already had my money.

The second issue is that obviously the solar company misrepresented the effectiveness of the system as I have since found out from a second plumber and various websites that very few combis are compatible with solar. Problem is I need to collect evidence of this to present to the solar company (or court if it goes that far) so that we can be compensated adequately. Otherwise I know they will likely try to direct the blame back to our plumber.

-Would I be eligible to get a refund from the plumber for the work that was carried out seemingly needlessly? They told me that was what needed to be done to fix the problem, I agreed to it, they did the work but it didn't do what they said it would I.E. make the boiler produce hot water for me again.

-Does anyone have any experience of being mis-sold solar heating products and if so what would my entitlements be? The installation itself is covered by a 1-year guarantee but I think that's more for if the actual workmanship is faulty so I'm guessing this would be a trading standards issue instead?