Service

One of the disadvantages of technological progress is that you need an expert to maintain and repair things - take a look under the bonnet of any car made in the past few years and you'll know exactly what I mean. This also applies to many domestics appliances. Add in a gas supply, as you would for a boiler, and you have to be Corgi or (as it's now known) Gas Safe registered. This isn't the case for solid fuel appliances.

Our Ecoflex pellet boiler has been running for 4 months now, and thanks to the bitterly cold weather it's been running at full load for much of the last 2! A few fault messages combined with the manual stating that it needs cleaning a couple of times per year prompted me to try dismantling it and giving it a clean/service last weekend.

I was pleased to find that it's pretty straightforward, with cleaning mostly comprising the removal of the burner and emptying ash and other deposits from the burner hearth. We've had some sintering (build up of gravel like particles) due to the ash becoming super heated, but this isn't unusual and as long as it's cleaned out regularly isn't expected to become a problem.

One of the two fault messages were 'check gate', which turns out to be a bad translation from the original Swedish and relates to an LED sensor in the pellet feed. A quick wipe with a cloth removed a build up of wood dust that was affecting this. The other was 'flame detector'; within the burner housing is a glass enclosed thermocouple and the glass had become blackened by ash and smoke. Another quick wipe with a cloth removed this and solved the problem.

I was relieved to get the boiler back together, and even more relieved that it fired up without any problems. So, okay,it needs more maintenance than a regular gas or oil boiler, but other than my time it doesn't cost anything to service. Long may that be the case!