The sound of the word ‘service’ is one every homeowner knows well. A reminder sticker on your boiler or an email from your trusted local gas engineer brings to mind a single image – an impending bill for annual maintenance, usually at a cost around £90. So what’s your next move? You might let the thought slide until the next time it pops into your head and put off the decision fully, hoping the engineer will stop bothering you. That is, until some icy Friday night in January when the shower turns to liquid ice. For Tewkesbury Boilers, visit https://www.combi-man.com/boiler-finance/boiler-finance-tewkesbury/
This is known as the cost of procrastination and you pay it because you delayed paying your £90. In the following sections, we take a look at just how much money a delay can really cost you.
Firstly, there’s the ‘Emergency Call-Out Tax’, which hits when your boiler breaks down for real, often in the midst of a winter cold snap. Instead of getting the benefit of an ordinary hourly rate, out-of-hours visits attract emergency rates; in short, the engineer will be twice or even triple as expensive to call upon. As soon as they walk through your door clutching their trusty toolbox and perhaps a spare part or two, you could be looking at anything between £150 and £300, depending on whether they can actually fix your problem or simply tell you where it is.
Beyond this, there’s ‘Escalation Multiplication’. Paying your £90 means your boiler enjoys what amounts to a health check-up. The engineer will leave it in a perfect working condition, free from debris and bad seals and with no unseen faults waiting to turn a routine service into an all-too-real catastrophe. But if you skip this year and maybe even next, that innocent-looking £20 to replace a hidden leak becomes a bill of four figures, thanks to the blocked valve and resulting failure of various internal components, such as the washer or main heat exchanger, maybe even the electrical circuits or the full PCB board. Add in emergency labour hours charged by the hour and you could end up shelling out nearly ten times the price you were trying to avoid: £90 for routine maintenance, compared with £900 for the privilege of having to call someone out of bed.
On top of these costs, there’s also the ‘Hidden Financial Drain’ that comes with failing to get your boiler serviced. The difference in efficiency between a serviced boiler and one left to its own devices cannot be overstated. The longer yours runs without attention, the harder it must work to power those radiators, clogged with dirty sludge and crusty limescale. At the same time, it’s forced to use more gas to do the job it once did with ease. Now your energy bills aren’t the only thing rising up to give you a scare.
