Netaheat engineer:

Netaheat engineers can be hard to find nowadays. Partly because all Netaheats are now old, and partly because in this industry people tend to separate into installers, whose answer to almost every breakdown call-out is ‘fit a new one’, and repair technicians (like me), who are usually quite skilled at getting almost any broken down boiler fixed and working again. The hard part for you as a customer is telling the difference, and working out which type of heating engineer you are getting. You’re probably not going to find out until you’ve had the visit and a diagnosis/recommendation. If you’ve inadvertently engaged an installer s/he will usually tell you parts are not available and to have it replaced, while a repair specialist will say fix it regardless of whether replacing it might actually be the better option. There is little I can do to help with this, beyond making you aware of this effect in the first place. The qualifications for both these occupations are identical so looking at those will be no help either.

The problem is rooted in the fact that if someone spends most of their time fixing the white box to the wall, installing radiators etc, they get very good at it and never have occasion or need to look at what goes on inside the white box that is the boiler, or gain any detailed understanding of how it works. In order to diagnose a boiler failure, a detailed grasp of the exactly how it works is necessary, along with the imagination to think of ways in which the fault observed could be caused. Boiler repair technicians however do this all day, day in, day out so consequently they get very good at this, far better than they are at fitting radiators and pipework which they only do on the odd occasion here and there.

You may be wondering why I’ve written this mildly oddly titled page so I’ll ‘fess up. I’ve written it to encourage traffic to this site as people often tell me they search for the term “netaheat engineer’ in their first attempt to find someone to fix their Netaheat boiler. This page is partly designed to be returned in response to that search and guide people to this site. I wonder if it will work…

Click here to visit my YouTube channel