Boring Insurance question - boiler and heaters ...

[Snowstorm]

... I've asked around my friends but DH and I seem to be the only people who have got boiler and heater insurance ... for which we pay British Gas a rather painful sum each year.

Has anyone else taken this kind of insurance out or am I paying out needlessly?

we have their cheapest option (bronze? basic? and only the boiler not the radiators) only because our boiler is 30 years old - if we had a modern one I wouldn't bother at all.

I'm not sure how old our boiler is but it's definitely not new (it was here before we got here and we've been here almost 9 years now). We're paying £242 a year for the priviledge of the annual boiler inspection and the annual cover ... and I'm just not sure it's worth it.

good lord!
we only pay about £60
maybe cut down the cover to a lower level?

I mean, how often has it exploded in the last 9 years ?

yikes, we only pay abut £140 for boiler and controls with annual service and emergency.

and by 'not modern' I mean the chap's eyes lit up and he said 'ooh, I haven't seen one of these since 1982, you know they stopped making them when t'factory in Burnley closed down in '78...'
If it goes out you have to crawl underneath with a taper to light the pilot light.

anything under 15yrs is young.

I've never had boiler cover in the 20 yrs I've been a homeowner, and TBH I've never missed it

We once had to have a couple of new radiators and with all the to-ing and fro-ing and work that was involved I think that we actually came out on top, financially, that year but apart from that ... Maybe we should just go back to having the boiler inspected annually and leave it at that? What really galls me (apart from how much the cover has risen in cost this year) is that the heating engineers are in and out so fast that you don't feel that they are doing a proper inspection ...

LISZ - who do you use, if you don't mind me asking?

British gas - we kept it going while we rented our house out. Boiler replaced 8 years ago.

I pay Domestic and General about £150 a year for the joy of not having to panic when my boiler goes mad (bless it,it has issues)

Anyhoo, mine is the platinum-super-special-with-diamonds policy, I know they do cheaper ones than mine.