The Heat and Buildings strategy advocates a softer approach - you can read the report here.

Instead of consigning boilers to museums where future generations point at Ideal Mexico or Vaillant combi boilers, the government is sensibly aiming for all new installations to “use low-carbon technology” by 2035.

Homeowners won’t be visited at night by government agents and coerced into removing existing gas boilers and the plan to ban them from 2040 seems to have been dropped in the UK.

Obviously, there are some great alternatives being developed to replace gas boilers - heat pumps and hydrogen boilers being two. Yet the price of installing an air source heat pump or ground source heat pump is prohibitively expensive when compared with a replaced or repaired gas boiler.

There are hopes across the industry that costs will reduce with Michael Lewis, CEO of E.ON UK stating:

"With the right policy framework in place, we’re confident the cost of a heat pump can be reduced by up to half over the coming years.”
We shall of course see.

Hydrogen boilers are on the horizon too - with a smaller consumer cost anticipated and newer gas boilers being able to convert to hydrogen from 2026, just 5 years away, in fact. Hydrogen boilers are not available though to homeowners yet, leaving heat pumps, solar thermal panels, biomass boilers and wood-burning stoves as alternatives.

We don’t think that you would argue though with our assertion that maintaining and repairing is a more sustainable and cost-effective route to take.

If you think about how global consumer giants like Apple and Samsung regularly update hardware to entice consumers to upgrade, you can see why Apple’s new repair policy makes sense.

Apart from improvements in cameras, battery life and processor speed, you and I would be hard pushed to differentiate the improvements between an iPhone 12 and an iPhone 13.

We don’t deal with smartphones, but we do deal with boiler parts and we do that, we hope, very well. With about 1000 products on our new website, we’re sure that you will find spare parts and accessories for major brands as a homeowner, a business owner or a heating engineer.