Can plumber charge for this small plumbing change?

Wisechild

Please could someone advise me if our plumber should be paid for needing to make a change to the system he installed for us 9 months ago.

Last October we had the plumber change our oil heating system to a gas heating system with a programme timer that we could set the CH and HW separately. Since it was winter these times often coincided or were quite close.

With the advent of summer we switched off the CH timer completely and only kept the HW timer on. Then we started noticing that some of the radiators still came on. With our holidays and his holidays he only finally came last week to take a look at the system. He says that its something that is quite common where the boiler and tank are quite close - he says it is called creep and the hot water is going the wrong way up the pipe leading to the radiators. He says he needs to install a small NRV on the pipe which will sort this out.

He will come back to me next week on when he can do the work, but in the meantime I don't know if he will charge me for this and if so, if he is warranted in doing so? Surely he should have left us with a fully functioning system last October and if he needs to make an amendment to ensure it is working properly then that is his problem? Maybe I'm anticipating something that isn't going to materialise but I don't want to be caught on the hop when he rings me next week.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Joey the lips

No i dont imagine he is entitled to charge. Tell him that you would like the work done and if he does not that you will be paying someone else to finish his job correctly and will persue the cost through the small claims court.

Or else simply agree to pay half of what he asks which i imagine is 75 euro(150/2 he will ask for) tell him if he installed it correctly you would not have to get him back

yoshytoshy

The fact that he came back to you to check ,suggests the guy is honest.
Did you originally have separate control of the water in your house ?

Did your plumber charge you for calling out to look at the problem ?

I wouldn't be as concerned about it ,as you seem to be. Just be straight with the guy without insinuating anything.

danjo

Firstly I am not a plumber.
However I have heard of radiators close to a boiler heating when HW only is selected on some systems. This is caused by a design/installation problem and was probably there in your original system. It would only become apparent after the new controller was installed. Perhaps he should have noticed it but if he had he surely would have charged you to fix.
If that is the case then I would think he would be entitled to charge to rectify it now. Just my tuppence worth.

Sparkpea

I tend to agree with danjo on this. We cannot know for sure how some existing systems are piped unless we rip up every floor/pipe or relay new pipes so as a plumber we can only assume that the previous plumber followed good practice. Obviously this isn't always the case and we've to make changes to the existing quote for extra materials/labour occurred.

I have been stung with this sort of thing in the past so all my quotes are now written and have some protection for me.. e.g. cost of work detailed then stating any extra work or work that is carried out due to unforeseen circumstances will be charged extra.

Wisechild

Thanks to all for your responses, much appreciated. Plumber is calling out on Monday and then we can talk about payment