I am seeing the hashtag #RetroBoilerLabel been thrown around on Social Media, the likes of HHIC supporting it, I’m sorry in my opinion this is just more poorly thought out nonsense and who exactly is this aimed at helping, no one as far as I can see apart from the boiler manufacturers who would be looking at selling more boilers.

If someone can’t afford to heat their home then they are in fuel poverty and should get assistance to make their bills more affordable, there are some schemes around that are supposed to do this, but from what I hear these schemes don’t always get the target fuel poverty people.

This latest nonsense, Retro Boiler label, is expecting service engineers to label old boilers they service or attend to fix a breakdown with the A-G label, classifying the boiler, E,F or G.WHY? if the boiler is working and the customer can afford the bills whats the problem….. I will tell you the problem, there has been a drop in boiler sales, so what do they do, they come up with stupid schemes like this to try and increase boiler sales, they want us as service engineers to try and shame people into having a new boiler, by labelling their boilers as old and out of date, what next, are we going to start putting a big red X on their front doors like they did during the black plague.

I have an idea for you, if you want to increase your boiler sales, how about you as manufacturers put your hands in YOUR pockets and stop trying to use installers and making us look the bad guys, why don’t you start cutting the price of your boilers instead of always putting them up, how about taking a little less profit, what about offering a discount to the homeowner for using your boiler rather then a rivals, boiler manufacturers should compete more with each other, there are many better ways to increase your sales rather than trying to shame people to buy a new boiler.

I am personally of the opinion if a boiler is working no matter how old then its efficient, yes if its constantly breaking down and costing money to keep repairing it, then yes, probably cheaper to replace in the long run, but simply telling people they should replace a working boiler just because its old and is maybe a G rated appliance, so what, its still efficient as its working, bought and paid for and you only pay for the gas, but we are supposed to fool people into thinking they are better off spending in excess of £2,000.00 to have a new boiler fitted, to maybe save £100 a year in gas and this is just an estimate, well now they have to repay or re-save £2k and whereas before they were only paying for gas, so if you take this figure of £100 saving on gas a year it will take 10 years just to be back to square 1 and by then going by modern boiler standards they may require a new boiler, I have come across boilers still working well after 40 years, why would I tell them to replace it just because it may now be classified as G rated.

If we truly want to reduce peoples running costs then we need some real honest schemes out there, we need peoples properties surveyed and honest advice given, not lets just get the best commission from this property, as far as I see it, the MOST important factor in any property to saving energy is insulation, KEEP THE HEAT IN, this should always be the starting point, there is absolutely no point in fitting a new boiler in the name of increasing efficiency if the property has a high heat loss, the same can be said for the heat emitters, if these are blocked or just poor performing sticking a new boiler on the end will not do much for the efficiency, we need to stop this nonsense of always targeting the boiler first as the cause of high fuel costs, there are many more things that should be addressed first, including checking what tariff people are on, adding insulation and changing energy supplier could be more than enough to reduce their bills significantly, so lets stop with the nonsense to generate more boiler sales for the manufacturers and merchants.

I think this Retro Boiler Label will go the same way as the Zombie Boiler nonsense and the ErP label, it will be ignored by most good quality installers who see it for what it is, a promotion to increase boiler sales