On the 1st of every month, £15 leaves the joint account for a savings pot labelled "Boiler", and for about four seconds I feel very responsible. Six payments since April had put £90 in the pot by the end of September, and this morning the seventh went out. It isn't much, and it's the reason I spent two evenings in September reading the small print of things I decided not to buy.
What we looked at
It started with the service in March. The engineer called our boiler, a 2014 gas combi, "tired but fine", which is how you'd describe a car with 120,000 miles on the clock. At eleven years old it is nearer the end of its working life than the start. In mid-September, once I'd turned the flow temperature down, I sat down with the offers on the table.
- Boiler-only cover: £14 to £19 a month, with a call-out excess of £60 to £95 each time someone comes.
- Home emergency cover (boiler, plumbing, electrics and more, with a limit on each): about £24 a month.
That works out at £168 to £228 a year for the boiler-only cover and £288 for the broader one, against £180 a year going into our pot. The prices weren't the interesting part. I read the exclusions first, because the sales page never leads with them. Faults that were already there when you take the policy out are left off. So is damage blamed on sludge, limescale or "lack of maintenance". Some wanted proof of a yearly service on top, which is the £85 or so we'd pay anyway. A couple had a waiting period before you could claim, and one had an upper age limit for the boiler.
Why the small print mattered to us
At the March service the engineer found the back bedroom radiator cold at the bottom and put it down to sludge in the system. Sludge is the very word in the exclusions. If that radiator turns out to be the start of something bigger, I can picture myself on the phone while somebody politely reads me page 14. I'm not saying a claim would be refused. I'm saying I'd rather not find out at 2am with the heating off.
I also asked our engineer what usually goes wrong on a boiler this age. He said most repairs run to a couple of hundred pounds, with a circuit board nearer £400. A Gas Safe engineer who knows your own boiler will give a better answer than I can, so I'm only passing on what ours said about ours.
What the pot can't do
The honest downsides of our choice are these. At £90 the pot wouldn't cover a big repair on its own. Cover would give us a number to ring, and a pot doesn't book an engineer for you at 2am or turn up with a part in the van. What makes the pot workable is the house fund behind it, which gets £200 a month, and the £3,000 emergency fund behind that. If we had neither, I'd be reading this page the other way up.
We do have Maureen's engineer's number, which she wrote on the back of an envelope and handed over like a family recipe. That counts for something, though it isn't the same as a contract. He's a person with a van and a life, and he will not always be free on a Sunday.
Where we landed
We kept the pot. I like that the money is still ours if nothing breaks, and that by next April it will be £180 sitting in a savings account either way. I also like that no word on page 14 can stop it paying out. I don't like that it might not be enough. The pot and the cover answer different questions: one is "how do we pay for it", the other is "who do we ring". We only really have the first one.
So the plan is the unglamorous one. Keep paying in on the 1st, keep the service book up to date, and think about the magnetic filter the engineer mentioned in March. Ask me again after the first proper cold snap. In the meantime I check the balance more often than I should, like someone going back to see whether they locked the front door.
