Invented Cylinder/Boilermate question

[ChickpeaDahling]

We are putting our house up for sale in the spring as we are relocating.

Disaster has struck - we have no heating or hot water! Had an engineer round - the PCB board has gone on the Boilermate 2000 and he advises we should replace it with an unvented cylinder at the cost of £5.5K!!
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2 Questions if anyone can answer them:

Is it necessary to replace the full thing, can't we just replace the PCB board?

Does £5.5k sound a reasonable figure to replace it and 2 days labour? They are suggesting replacing it with a Gledhill invented Cylinder 180L which looks to cost less than £700. I know there are other bits to buy but £5.5k seems excessive!

Hoping that we don't have to spend a fortune when we need to move very soon!

Hoping @pigletjohn might be able to help please 🙂

How old is the boiler that has broken? If old then it could make sense to replace as you need to get through another winter and it is appealing to buyers.

Not sure what is needed pipe wise to go from vented to unvented (I assume that is what you mean) but to give perspective we had our old boiler replaced this year. The replacement trade value was £1k so more than your new one would be, and it cost £1.6k fitted including a chemical flush of all pipe work. So yours sounds high to me

Ask around local friends and neighbours for a well-established qualified heating engineer who knows how to mend things.

Avoid large companies and people who only know how to do new installs.

Meanwhile consider the possibility of negotiating a cash reduction with your buyer so they can do whatever they want

The PCB can be replaced, but do you know that that is the correct problem? Sometimes you replaced the PCB and then another part fails on the boiler.

The PCB can be purchased re conditioned sometimes, if the boiler is old it may not be possible to source the PCB.

I can ask my husband when he's home. He is a gas engineer.

Thanks all.

Getting a few more quotes so we can go with who we feel most confident with rather than just the lowest price. Didn't feel overly confident with the engineer we had round, I'm not sure his quote is high on purpose as he doesn't want the job.

The boiler is 3 years old, it's the Boilermate that has the faulty PCB board - that is around 19yrs old.

We are hoping @PigletJohn that we can repair it enough to get us through winter as we won't put it up for sale until the New Year - I guess if something comes up on the survey about it we'd be happy to negotiate a bit off as we do know it's not a new Boilermate

That seems a lot to me, I had an unvented cylinder put in for about £1.5k 3 years ago, no new boiler but had to take out the old hot water tank gravity system and put in the new unvented system with a new 250L tank in the loft.

May be worth contacting Gledhill direct as they still offer service plans and are likely best bet to have parts.

gledhill-response.net/products/boilermate/

The quote does seem like an easy option as lots of engineers just don't like touching the Boilermates as they are a pain for many of them. When they are working they are great as I have one myself, had to sort a sensor last year which wasn't cheap but still way cheaper than a replacement

Yes you're so right you need the unvented ticket and I think it's called a G3 or something like that

It's the years of expertise you pay for with a gas engineer really isn't it?