Intouch Our industry needs some original thinking

April’s edition featured an article on the Flue Safe plug, a plumber’s brilliant idea. We had Condensate Pro before that, Flue Snug, Nerrad tools and even the good old magnetic filter. What do they all have in common? They’ve all been designed by plumbers and gas engineers.

These days it seems to me they’re the only ones innovating. Manufacturers, institutions and government, with their huge power and resources, don’t seem to be coming up with anything new. Instead, they’re all bogged down with heat pumps, hydrogen, hybrid systems, an extra 0.5 per cent efficiency, yet better controls and insulating

DHW pipework. Hardly groundbreaking for most of them. Heat pumps have been around for decades.

There’s so much more to this industry than heat pumps and Boiler Plus.

We’re supposed to have the installation manual at hand when working on a gas appliance. How often do we really have it when carrying out a landlord’s gas safety record on a cooker or fire? Have you tried getting the manual? It’s the law, yet some manuals are still very hard to find. Why not force all manufacturers to submit a copy of their manuals to Gas Safe for members to access? A central and complete repository, rather than the myriad places offering boiler manuals of the most popular brands only.

Why do we still have to pay to access British Standards? That’s not a very encouraging way to disseminate them.

Is there a good reason why manufacturers are still producing boiler flues made of metal externally, which often end up corroded? Why not plastic? The inner flue is already in plastic.

Why are manufacturers still placing the PCB in combi boilers at the bottom, where water will collect in the event of a leak? Why not move it anywhere else except there?

Newer controls are coming out all the time. Has any