All the gear, no idea.
We booked Chamings out to install and commission our Rayburn. They came out to look at the proposed location of the new Rayburn in order to better inform their quote. We were quoted in excess of £2000 and we agreed, paying them the first half of the balance.
Installation day arrives and the technician on site stated that he would not be connecting the flue because it ‘wasn’t on the job sheet’. This was confusing given that it was due to be commissioned the following day and the flue needs to be connected for that to happen. It’s also ridiculous given that they had already been round to survey everything and knew exactly what needed to be done. We were therefore forced to get another tradesperson in to connect the flue at terrifyingly short notice.
The install went well and we had a working Rayburn for one day. Through no fault of Chamings the Rayburn cooker had an intermittent fault. Chamings returned to diagnose the problem and concluded that the thermostat on the cooker was faulty and would cost £100 to replace. This they did, but when the bill came in it was actually £250. The Rayburn then worked for one more day before developing exactly the same intermittent fault, so clearly the original diagnosis was incorrect. They then concluded that the fault ‘could’ actually be a faulty printed circuit board and that would be nearly £1000 to purchase and fit. We got a very blunt email stating that they weren’t sure what the problem was, and if we paid for that circuit board and it turned out not to be the cause of the problem then we would not be entitled to any refund.
Extremely irritated at at Chamings’ reluctance to properly diagnose the problem at this point, we started contacting other oil fired heating engineers who were mostly incandescent with rage (or uncontrollably laughing) at what we’d been through. One of them spent ten minutes on the phone to me, asking me a few questions about how the Rayburn was behaving (he didn’t even come over to look at the Rayburn) and diagnosed a fault with the sequential controller. We investigated this and found a loose wire inside connection to the sequential controller. We tightened it and it has worked beautifully ever since.
I have three questions:
1) Why on Earth were Chamings unable to diagnose the problem when they had physical contact with the Rayburn, not to mention a huge amount of technical diagnostic gear, and yet a man on the end of the phone could diagnose the issue in ten minutes flat without even setting foot in our home?
2) When I called to ask them for commissioning figures (the third time they’ve been contacted and asked this question) they told me someone would call me back. Why hasn’t this happened?
3) Why are we still waiting for the commissioning figures more than a year later?
Chamings are not good at what they do. I would strongly advise any potential customers of theirs to choose a technician or company with actual expertise before throwing money in the direction of people who don’t know anything. They’ve even had the audacity to call me offering us an annual service! No thank you, we’d rather leave jobs like that to people who know what they’re doing!
