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Who should I hire to clean my Buderus boiler?

newtonkid88
newtonkid88 Member Posts: 104

Do I have a fuel company come? The people who sell me the oil?

Or do I hire a plumber that also does heat?

I wonder if the oil company will do their best to keep it running as efficient as possible, since they sell me the fuel.

i’m located in MA

Comments

  • Big Ed_4
    Big Ed_4 Member Posts: 3,176

    Have your oil company clean your boiler , they would be the best to work on a oil burner unless the plumber worked in the oil industry ..

    There was an error rendering this rich post.

    SuperTechEdTheHeaterMan
  • Grallert
    Grallert Member Posts: 956

    Pictures of fouled up boilers with zero context. Personally? when I was doing oil service my goal was the make and keep our customers happy and their systems running as best as possible. I never or rarely ran into a service tech who didn't care. Maybe I ran in rarified circles.

    Miss Hall's School service mechanic, greenhouse manager, teacher, dog walker and designated driver

    HydronicMikeEdTheHeaterMan
  • Steamhead
    Steamhead Member Posts: 17,723

    I think you did. And I'm not the only one who's posted these:

    This kind of thing makes everyone in the business look bad. I'm tired of it.

    All Steamed Up, Inc.
    Towson, MD, USA
    Steam, Vapor & Hot-Water Heating Specialists
    Oil & Gas Burner Service
    Consulting
    LRCCBJEdTheHeaterMan
  • EdTheHeaterMan
    EdTheHeaterMan Member Posts: 10,363

    In Cape May County there were two Full Service fuel dealers that employed their own service technician during my time doing oil burner service there.  There were about 6 other oil only dealers there. One of those full service companies had some techs that knew their stuff.  There was another that had someone that already "Knew it all" and did the majority of that company's oil burner repairs and the occasional boiler replacement.   When that one tech retired, that company got around to contacting me, as a self employed sub contractor, to fill the gap.  I found so many customers that had sooty boilers and furnaces that I could not believe that this company was able to keep their customers from switching to gas.   After 2 years of maintaining these boilers I was able to reduce the fuel usage significantly of many of the customers and management decided that I was not a team player and elected to hire someone in house to do the oil burner work. (long story involved here)

    So it is hit or miss when hiring an oil burner service person. For the most part, if you have a family owned oil company (they are becoming rare)  that offers a full service company approach to keeping your oil burner operating dependability and efficiently, that is your best bet for the long run.   If there are several fuel oil only dealers (often called discount oil dealers) in your area and you happen to be using one of those for your fuel delivery, then there should be a self employed oil burner person, or an HVAC or Plumber that has a good oil burner tech that is available to all the customers that need service when their oil delivery company does not offer service and repair for those customers.    I happened to be that HVAC company from 1979 up to 2018.  I worked on customers that purchased fuel from 6 different fuel dealers and was careful to remain neutral when recommending one oil dealer over another.  If you owned an oil delivery company and you sent me your customer for repair or maintenance, I did my best to make sure that person stayed your oil customer. And the fuel dealers recommended me more often that way because they knew that I was not going to lose them any customers because of me or the techs that I employed.   

    All that said, Once you find a company with a good burner technician, do your best to stay with that technician. (even if that tech changes jobs and is hired by someone else.)  In the oil burner service business, the technician that is the best often finds that doing the maintenance part of the job is beneath them. As a result you get the rookie that will be doing the maintenance portion of the work and only get the "good at what he does" technician after you have a problem that was not solved by the rookie. That's just the way it is in the trades. We all got to learn somewhere and sometimes that learning happens at the customers home.

    Edward Young Retired

    After you make that expensive repair and you still have the same problem, What will you check next?

    LRCCBJ
  • jesmed1
    jesmed1 Member Posts: 1,243
    edited April 12

    If you're in Newton MA, I'm not far away. We have two oil boilers burning about 1200 gallons per year in a 4-unit condo building. We have a large regional oil company who services and cleans our boilers, and their techs are very good. I don't know if I'm allowed to recommend them, but their name is D*****y Energy. If you have Google you can figure it out. Their techs clean our pin-type boilers very thoroughly, which is a pain in the butt. The Buderus is much easier to clean, so they can handle those too.

    I also recommend joining Green Energy Consumer Alliance for $25/year. That gets you a pre-negotiated markup on wholesale oil prices through your oil company. Typically it saves 30 cents or so per gallon vs the MA average. I figure we save $400-$500/year vs what we were paying before, to the same oil company. It's a great deal and I don't know why more MA heating oil users don't know about it.

  • newtonkid88
    newtonkid88 Member Posts: 104

    D Energy is the company that installed my boiler. And according to the people on this website, they plumbed it wrong… as far as “pumping away” is concerned.

  • jesmed1
    jesmed1 Member Posts: 1,243
    edited April 13

    If a large heating company with 100+ employees (I'm guessing) does one install with a circulator in a non-optimal location, that doesn't mean that everyone in the company is automatically incompetent to clean a boiler.

    D Energy is more than capable of cleaning a Buderus boiler. I've observed a number of their techs over the 10+ years we've used them, and they've all been good. We have Weil-McLain pin-type boilers that are difficult to clean, and the D techs take their time and do a good, thorough job. And Buderus boilers are much easier to clean. If you can use a wrench and a bottle brush, you can clean a Buderus.

    So I think you've been misled to the false conclusion that because one of your new boiler installation details is sub-optimal that suddenly the entire company is incompetent. My experience with their techs over 10+ years says the opposite, as they've all been good.

    Also, incidentally, I just had a D Energy sales rep out to price a new boiler install. The rep was extremely knowledgeable and really knew his stuff. Not just a "sales guy," he grew up servicing oil boilers in his father's business in Boston. We spent an hour talking about heating systems, including the finer points of our particular install involving a bypass with a thermostatic valve, and I would absolutely trust him to design/install our new system properly.