Conned 2 - part 8

The letter of complaint that I sent to the directors of the company brought forth a very cold and formal letter, informing me that they had received it, and that they would deal with it within 28 days.

So now, although my main complaint, the smell, had been eliminated, I still had the question of why it had happened and whether there was a secondary problem which had caused the water leak. And their engineer Harry had stipulated in his report that the system should be redone, and that he had found evidence of leakage.

My daughter and her farmily were with me one weekend, so she spent several  hours taking readings every ten minutes  from the boiler - and figuring out how it all was working. Then she went home and did a lot of research to find out how it should have been working. She was amazed how slowly the house heated. It took two hours to raise the temperature by 2 degrees. So she got the name and phone number of one of the chielf engineer who I had talked to in the past, and was going to quiz him on why my machine was working differently than it should be.

Although she didn't immediately talk to the chief engineer, she had a good conversation with the receptionist, who agreed, that if my daughter put her questions in writing, she find out the answers and email her back.My daughter agreed to set the questions, but she said she wanted to speak to
the engineer  directly about them, not just have a second hand email reply.

The chief engineer, Mark,  seemed much more interested in her complaints than he was in mine,
and they had a long conversation. He, in the end, agreed to come to see my instalation, and if it required it, would put into place the arrangement for it to be redone.

Mark came on his own and arrived at 9.30. He tried to find a leak or a smell, and failed in both. He turned the heating very high, and no problem came from it,  so he declared there was no problem. 
He emptied some water out of a radiator and had me smell it - and it wasn't smelling much, certainly not the smell I had before. So he said the smell couldn't possibly have come from the box, and he
thinks it is from a dead animal under the floor. How a dead animal could suddenly explode into a smell that penetrated a whole house in less than a few minutes and did it at various time over seven occasions, I don't know. And anyway, I have smelled dead animals and it wasn't that sort of smell. I told him he was wrong, and I was willing to put money on it.

He said the deposits behind the box which his colleague had said were due to the explosion which caused the smell, he said was rust flakes from the pipes. (the pipes weren't rusty.) He stayed about an hour, and half of that time was talking to my daughter on the telephone telling her all the stuff he hadn't bothered to tell me.

I told him, in a somewhat heated exchange, that I felt I had been conned by his company. For nearly six months, I had had problems, and they had refused to deal with them, and now it turns out that it all cold have been solved by the installer or the inspector who came afterwards doing something as simple as turning the temperature on the boiler down.

He became very angry and said he would support his colleagues in saying they had all done a proper job and he felt the problem was mostly in my imagination. Then he stormed out of the house.

I thought he would drive off, but after a few minutes, he came back, and said that he would file a report and no doubt I would do the same. As the boiler was due its annual check up, he said that I should ask the engineer who came whether he felt the water leaks could be  due to the boiler itself. He also said that any compensation for money that I felt that I had not saved, would be considered when details were sent over a year's worth  of bills. And he put out his hand to shake mine as he left.

The gas company engineers were not all that helpful either. The first one came five minutes before his job time finished (I had been told he would come between 12 and 6 and he arrived at 5.55.) So he said he had no time to do a service, but would make an appointment for the following week to do that. He said I might want to have a product which sealed up leaks in the boiler and radiators.

He didn't come on the next occasion, and the colleague who was sent in his stead started by
trying to sell me a new boiler and just writing off my investments as a bad mistake. . The new boilers were on special that week. No, I didn't agree. But he was very convincing in his arguments. If only I had gone that route six months previously.

He also told me that his boiler at home  lost water too, and there was nothing wrong with it. He
topped it up at least four times a year. He said he wasn't able to do any repairs, so that if I found the water leakage continued, I would have to put in a request for an engineer to come and put the sealant in, but he suggested that I leave it for awhile just to gauge if I had a problem or not.

So that is the end of my saga. Thank you to anybody who read through all this. At this moment in time, I am content with the machines and it is too warm to need central heating anyway. I sincerely hope that I shall never feel the need to write an update of this story to you.