Blog: My condenser boiler hell

Blog: It was another snowy, sub-zero night in Shropshire, writes Carl Jones.

Here I was, armed with a kettle of boiling hot water, floundering in the dark outside my mother's house.

Yes, you guessed it - she's got a condenser central heating boiler. You know, the kind which are breaking down all over Shropshire at the moment . . .

The panel on the front was flashing, and all the radiators had gone cold. Something was definitely up.

• Read more comments here

Being a white-collar type not particularly keen on fiddling with pipework, I phoned round a few plumbers to see if they could come to my rescue.

Very polite they all were (the ones I could get through to!), but the answer was the same: "Chock-a-block with emergencies. No appointments til after Christmas. Really sorry, but we've never known it so busy."

Right then. Time to think laterally.

Condenser boilers, as those with the misfortune to possess one will know, have a pipe which protrudes outside the house, allowing the condensation to escape.

My mother's system has a 2ft-foot section outside her kitchen wall, which runs down the brickwork and underground.

Having decided it might be frozen, I boiled four kettles, and systematically drizzled in over the pipes in the hope of de-frosting the blockage.

Suddenly, after about 30 minutes of hard graft, there was a snap, crackle and pop, and a sudden fizzing of water heading out of the house and under the ground.

I'd done it. Back inside, I pressed the "reset" button on the boiler's front panel, and the radiators were warm as toast within 15 minutes.

So, good news, and bad. I saved myself £100-plus on an emergency plumbing call out, but now realise that every time the temperature dips below freezing I'm going to be worrying myself sick about mother's radiators and racing round to boil the kettle.

It's clear from the avalanche of comments on the Shropshire Star website that I'm not alone.

It's all very well doing our bit in the UK to help combat climate change, but progress means replacing old systems with better, more efficient ones. Not those liable to throw a temperature tantrums.

And it does beg the question: If these boilers are clearly so prone to breaking down during the coldest of cold snaps - the time when vulnerable folk need them the most - are they truly fit for purpose in 21st century big-chill Britain?