Is my boiler too old for boiler cover?

This gets asked two ways. Either the boiler is fifteen years old and you are wondering whether anyone will still cover it, or you have had cover on it for years and you are wondering what that cover would really do if the thing finally died.

Plenty of providers will sell you cover on an old boiler, so the first question answers itself. The second is the useful one, and almost nobody writes it down, because the people who publish on this subject are mostly the people selling the policies.

Cover is not a replacement promise

An annual policy pays for repairs. On an ageing boiler that is worth something, because the parts that fail in a boiler's second decade are the ones that cost real money to fit.

Replacement is a different thing, and where it appears at all it appears as a tightly defined exception rather than a benefit. The phrase to look for in your documents is not "replace". It is "beyond repair".

Beyond repair is a definition, not an engineer's opinion

Most people assume beyond repair means an engineer looked at the boiler and shook their head. In a policy it is far more mechanical. HomeServe's heating cover terms define it as a test with three limbs: the parts needed are not available within 28 days, or are no longer manufactured, or the retail cost of the parts exceeds 85 per cent of the retail cost of a new appliance.

Two of those three limbs have nothing to do with the condition of your boiler. They are about whether a factory still makes a component and how fast a wholesaler can get hold of it. A boiler that runs perfectly well between faults can meet the definition because a plastic housing went out of production two years ago.

That is the thing to understand about cover on an old boiler. The clock that decides its fate is not the boiler's. It is the manufacturer's parts timetable, and nobody consults you about it.

Source: HomeServe Heating, Plumbing and Electrics Plus terms and conditions

The seven year line, and what it quietly moves onto you

Where a policy does contribute to a replacement, age tends to decide who pays for the fitting rather than whether you get anything. The same HomeServe terms put it plainly: if the boiler is less than seven years old the replacement includes the cost of its installation, and where the boiler is aged seven years or over, you are required to pay the cost of its installation.

That matters more than it sounds. On a swap the appliance is one line on the quote. Labour, the flue, the system clean, the controls and the making good are the rest, and in an older property they are frequently the larger half. A policy that contributes towards the box and leaves the fitting with you has not solved the problem, it has made a dent in it.

Seven years is not one company's quirk. It turns up as the stated reason in a real Financial Ombudsman Service case, where British Gas's position was that the boiler was more than seven years old when it was deemed beyond economic repair and the policy did not cover replacement above that age. The complaint was not upheld, for separate reasons about servicing evidence, but the age threshold itself was not in dispute. It is a line claims get decided on, not a marketing detail.

Source: Financial Ombudsman Service decision DRN-2480721

The clause that ends the cover

This is the part that surprises people. When the parts run out, the policy does not simply decline to replace the boiler. It can stop covering it at all. An Aviva gas boiler breakdown policy sets out what happens when spares cannot be found or will take more than 28 days to source: the repair cannot be completed, and then, in the policy's own words, "in this event we will deem that we can no longer offer you gas boiler breakdown cover". A fixed contribution towards a new boiler is attached to that, set by the policy rather than by what the job costs, and then the cover is finished.

The same document keeps that right open in advance. Under boiler type and condition it says the insurer reserves the right to assess the boiler at any time and is not able to continue to cover boilers which can no longer be supported due to parts being obsolete.

So the end state for an old boiler on cover is not endless repairs. It is a day when the provider decides the appliance is no longer supportable, pays a set sum and withdraws. You are then uninsured, without heating, and buying a boiler at whatever notice the failure gave you.

Source: Aviva Gas Boiler Breakdown Cover with excess terms and conditions

Check your own policy, in about ten minutes

Terms vary and they get rewritten, so do not take the documents above as your policy. Find yours and look up four things, usually in the definitions at the front or the exclusions at the back.

• How beyond repair is defined, and whether a parts availability window appears in it. The number of days is what matters.
• Whether there is an age at which the policy stops contributing to installation, and what that age is.
• Whether the provider can withdraw cover because parts have become obsolete, and whether it can assess the boiler to decide.
• What is excluded in the first few months of a new policy. Several providers will not replace a boiler for a fault that arose shortly after the cover was taken out, so buying cover once the boiler is misbehaving does not work.

What this looks like from the installer's side

We see the back end of this every winter around Northampton and Milton Keynes. Somebody has had cover for eight or ten years, a part finally becomes unobtainable, the provider pays its set contribution and withdraws, and the household is ringing round for a replacement in the second week of January with no heating on.

That is the worst position to buy from, and not because of anything an installer does to you. It is because you have no time. You take the first firm with a free van rather than the one that surveys properly, and any choice about sizing or system type gets made for you by the calendar.

If your boiler is past ten and your policy reads like the ones above, stop treating replacement as something that happens to you when the boiler dies. Find out whether parts for your model are still being made. Any decent engineer will tell you during a service, and that answer is the best single predictor of how long you have got. If it is vague, you are nearer the end than the boiler's behaviour suggests.

The short version

Your boiler is probably not too old to insure. It may well be old enough that the insurance does something much narrower than you think. Cover buys repairs, and the repairs stop not when the boiler gives up but when the parts do.

None of that makes cover a con. It makes it a repair contract with a horizon, and the sensible thing is to know roughly where that horizon sits. The parts timetable will give you warning if you ask for it.

Work it out before the parts decide for you

It is worth knowing what replacing it would involve in your house rather than guessing. Tell us about the boiler and the property and we will put you in touch with three vetted local Gas Safe registered installers who will survey before they promise anything.