Running off the leash

Since being made to re-apply for their job of running the register (the 'R' in their name) of gas installers - and losing it (to CRAPITA, who so far have managed not to f**k it up) - CORGI have obviously had to reappraise their business model: instead of pulling in a steady income of registration fees from a captive market of folks like me, they now have to actually go out and earn a living.

Before they lost the registration job they were already selling van and liability insurance and running Competent Persons schemes in electrics as well as plumbing and ventilation, and sold sundries like Landlord's Gas Safety record pads. This is potentially good stuff: the folks at CORGI ought to have a better idea what their former members require in the way of, say, insurance than even the 'specialist' insurance companies who deal with a range of trades, and be able to arrange more appropriate cover at better prices. And sure enough they gave me the best deal on Professional Indemnity/Public Liability insurance when I had to renew it last year.

They also run a direct marketing operation corgi-direct.com which regularly sends me emails which always sound as if they're rather pathetically desperately trying to drum-up business, offering stuff I never want to buy at the prices they're asking. Today's was a classic: not only entirely tangential but illiterate to boot:

It's a disappointing waste of effort: taking a look at their website while writing this post I saw that they actually have some useful-looking stuff at not totally OTT prices, but they don't present it very well. In particular they have publications and stationery which you really need to see something of to tell if they're worthwhile, but the site gives only minimal descriptions and pictures of the covers of the books and images of forms at too low resolution to see what you're getting.

Now, for no apparent reason, they've started badge-engineering not-particularly-exciting items like central heating thermostats sold through Toolstation.

Why? This - and the other CORGI badged items - aren't particularly exotic, or cheap, or anything. And I can't imagine many of my customers wanting a CORGI logo on the thermostat in their living room so I'll buy plain ones by preference.

But the icing on the, er, bottom of the barrel has to be this:

 For years every time any of us installed a boiler we have had to notify it to the local council under Building Regulations. We could do this directly via Councils' Building Control offices but it's an expensive bureaucratic palaver, and CORGI, when they ran the installers' register, had a scheme (now run by their successor Gas Safe Register) that lets us notify installations to them, online or by phone for a few quid, and they notify the LA. So, over the years CORGI have acquired a database of names and addresses of people and the makes and models of boilers they've had installed and when they were done, and now they're using this to tout for the business of our erstwhile customers to sell them service contracts!

When CORGI lost their job to CAPITA the deal was that the latter would have the job for 10 years at the most, after which it would be up for grabs again. I daresay when that time comes around CORGI may be making another bid for it. It would of course be a cruel irony if their behaviour in the interim were a factor militating against their chances of success.

Fry-up

Impressive. I guess there was some muck on the PCB which got some tracking going between connections with mains between them and when the board got hot enough to char it allowed more current to pass, more heat, more charring, until it popped the fuse. Stunk the place out.

Recommendation

One of the nice things about working for yourself is that when you work for people you like the people they recommend you to also tend to be people you get on with, whereas the arseholes^[1] you wish you'd stayed clear of in the first place don't pass you on to other arseholes.

"Tend to", note. In general. Not always.

A pleasant couple I've done a few bits of work for over the years asked me to call up a neighbour of theirs who was having trouble with her boiler. This was on a Saturday. On the phone the neighbour volunteered that it was "A Potterton" in that way that you just know they think they're pretty clued up not only to be able to tell a boiler from a hole in the ground but to give you that much information on it, and any attempt to get them to further identify it and maybe even press an overheat reset button or suchlike is going to be about as profitable as trying to pin a politician down to an election manifesto commitment. Since it was pretty Arctic at the time and I was already booked up for Monday I offered to go round on the Sunday to look at it. Spent about half an hour taking covers off and testing bits to verify what the problem seemed to be and what it would need to fix it and told her. At this point she mentions that By The Way she's already got an engineer coming round the next morning to see to it.

What the ....?!!!

I suppose I should have charged her an arm and a leg for my time but I didn't even do that. They'll throw me out of the Federation of Rogue Traders if they find out. To be honest I just wanted out of there. I mean it wasn't just that the boiler was down in the basement (a big basement which seemed to go on round twists and turns forever) and she had a touch of the Kathy Bates about her; she even asked as I was leaving if I was married, and wanted to get married again. I was glad to be out in the fresh air ...

And then a couple of days later she phones up - in the middle of the evening - to complain that the other installer fitted a new programmer and she can't work out how to use it. Er, aren't there instructions for it? Yes but because she's so exceptionally intelligent (at this point I lost track of how her family had conspired against her because of her near-genius level of intellect to deny her the education she needed, or something) ... well for some reason she couldn't work the thing and the guy who'd fitted it, his mobile was switched off, I can't imagine why. I don't know if she expected me to leap into my RogueMobile and go over and sort it out for her (probably for free) that instant if not sooner, but I did manage to convey that that wasn't going to happen, and lose her. For now at least.

Now how do you block numbers on this phone?

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[1] It's not really fair to compare these sorts of people with the part of the body concerned with defecatory functions. An arsehole may not be everybody's idea of a pleasant organ but it does at least perform a useful function.

Sign Right

He doesn't mention his evident talent for signwriting.

Or vehicle maintenance.

Now you see it ...

There's a Derren Brown mentalism piece in one of his TV shows where he gets into a taxi (along with his camera crew^[1]) on the North side of the embankment across the river from the London Eye, rattles off some patter to the cabbie as they're getting in, and asks to be taken to the Eye. Then, despite the fact it's staring them all in the face just across the river the poor driver is humming and haaing "Oh I know it's around here somewhere, um, err ...." - completely unable to see - or register - it.

And Robert Pirsig in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" talks about 'gumption traps', where you can't see the bleedin' obvious right in front of your nose.

So when you get asked to look at a tank in the attic that's overflowing the first thing you look at is the filling valve ('ballcock' to you civilians). And then you check it again, in case you missed something first time. Because 9 times out of 10 that's the problem. There are other mechanisms which - like Rare Diseases in medicine - are rare. In particular, in a conventional old-school British system with tanks (usually in the attic) for cold water storage and one for the central heating system, a leak within the hot water cylinder's heat exchanger coil can allow water from whichever tank has the higher water level to get through to the other one. But that's rare. Very rare.

There's also an interesting thing called 'pumping over' that can go on in central heating header tanks, involving water getting either expelled or sucked in to the system via the vent pipe (the pipe with the upside-down 'U'-shape with an open end over the tank) which results in the tank getting filled with hot water, clouds of mist filling the attic in cold weather and massive corrosion occurring in radiators and boiler over a period of months or a few years. So when you get called to look at an installation that has both of these symptoms the true Rogue Plumber will get distracted with the pumping-over problem, miss the obvious cause of the overflow and tell the customer he needs a new hot water cylinder.

And unless the customer has the nous to get a second opinion from another plumber who correctly diagnoses and fixes the problem our RP hero is set for his 15 minutes of fame and free advertising on Rogue Traders.

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[1] and sound crew, lighting, make-up, key grip, mole grip, catering, fluffer, fluffer's mate, best boy and Ken Morse on Rostrum Camera, no doubt.

Any Luck?

... she asked, returning with her kids as I was packing up after a couple or 3 hours cleaning the soot off the heat exchanger of her Ideal Excrement boiler, resoldering the wires to the overheat thermostat where the heat blasting up outside the blocked heat-exchanger had melted the solder and cut out the thermocouple (mercifully locking out the boiler - which is why they had called me out) then smoke-bomb and spillage-testing it as I put it back together and fired it up (with the FGA measuring ambient CO levels next to it as I did so) and fitting a CO alarm to hopefully clue them in to problems if they manage to leave it unmaintained for long enough for it to soot up again.

"Luck?" I says, "yes, dahlin'^[1] you could say so. Like: you're lucky to be alive. And even luckier your kids are, given that they're more susceptible to Carbon Monoxide, which your boiler must've been chucking out like it was going out of fashion."

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1 The salutation recommended by the Charterted Institute of Rogue Plumbers in their Customer Relations training manual "Appropriate forms of address for female menbers of the public what are fit. And MILF"

Scaly Monsters

If calling this blog Bad Plumbing isn't a blatant enough attempt at capitalising on Ben Goldacre's well-established and successful "Bad Science" brand to precipitate an attack of the lawyers, then trespassing on his turf with a health-related story must surely provoke the good doctor beyond endurance.

This is limescale:

Lechuguilla Cave, New Mexico
photograph by Derek Lee, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0

No self-respecting cave should be without some, but you don't want it swilling around as white flakes in your kettle, clogging up your showerhead, destroying your electric shower or damaging your combi boiler. Though apart from that it probably doesn't do you any harm - and may even be good for your heart - though possibly not good for your skin.

These are scale inhibitors:

They come in a variety of technologies - magnetic, electromagnetic, electrolytic and phosphor-dosing - the plumbing-world equivalents of crystal healing, acupuncture, homeopathy and science-based medicine. In other words most of them may look and sound impressive but there's precious little evidence that they actually work, except for one type which does: phosphor dosing.

Here are some phosphor-dosing scale inhibitors:

These all have a container of "polyphosphate" material - as a powder, granules of various sizes or lumps the size of small marbles. Some of this material dissolves into the water as it passes and - through mechanisms which weren't part of the Chemistry syllabus when RP was at school - prevents the Calcium Bicarbonate in hard water from changing to Calcium Carbonate and precipitating out as Limescale when the water is heated. (Executive summary: it just works.)

These phosphor-dosing devices come in various shapes and sizes, at prices generally between £50 and £100.

And this is a typical water softener:

These work on a completely different principle to scale inhibitors, swapping the Calcium bit of Calcium Bicarbonate for Sodium. Sodium Bicarbonate ("bicarb" to you cooks) doesn't turn into solid clag when it's heated and even when it dries up on surfaces (such as the tiles around your shower, and on taps etc) it dissolves off again easily. But water softeners cost around £500, and you have to keep feeding them large bags of salt which can get expensive.

And this is NoCalc.

Technically it's a phosphate-dosing scale inhibitor: it adds a bit of polyphosphate to the water. However by a clever application of advanced marketing technology it has become a scale inhibitor. And costs £250.
Click on any of the pages from the brochure above to see a full-size image, or here for a PDF version of their (more recent) brochure.


As we can see this device offers remarkable benefits:

Not least of these is - we learn - that NoCalc "prevents skin irritations, eczema and psoriasis"! This is surely such wonderful news for the millions of eczema sufferers alone that one hopes the NoCalc factories are capable of producing these miraculous devices at sufficient rate that those afflicted by this distressing condition (and their parents - eczema particularly affects small children) do not have to wait long for relief from their problems. Once they've found the paltry two hundred and fifty-odd quid for one, of course.

And of course extending the life of one's dishwasher, washing machine and central heating boiler, reducing energy bills (by at least the £249.99 purchase cost of the NoCalc) and using less than a third of one's normal soap and cleaning products is not to be sniffed at either.

Sadly, however, the brilliant feat of literary engineering that has endowed this humble device with such unparalleled benefits for humankind fares badly when exposed to the agent known as ASA.