by MarkJ » Fri 01 Jan 2010, 08:18:14
Many of our boiler customers suffer from sticker shock when we give them price quotes on repairs, upgrades and installations.
The cost of copper piping, iron piping, stainless piping, gas lines, oil lines, copper tankless coils, copper or stainless indirect water heaters, copper, brass and iron fittings, isolation valves, air scoops, pressure reducing valves, pressure tanks, backflow preventers, flow-check valves, unions, flanges, purge valves, circulators, pre-fab headers, pro-press fittings, radiant fittings, baseboard, radiators, panel radiators, oil filters, nozzles, aquastats, water feeders, pressure cutoffs, low water cutoffs, oil pumps, burners and repair/replacement parts have skyrocketed.
This has priced many lower income people out of the market, thus forcing them to run decades old grossly oversized, grossly inefficient equipment, or forced them to apply for HEAP, Emergency HEAP or free furnace, boiler maintenance, repair or replacement.
Due to skyrocketing copper prices, many installers re-use old piping and components, install singe vs multiple zones, cut corners on labor/equipment and use iron piping and fittings instead of copper.
Most of the iron fittings are made in China. The iron fittings are relatively cheap, available in large sizes, available everywhere, reusable and they can be installed by unskilled laborers without torches, soldering or skills.
Chinese iron fittings used to be garbage, but quality has improved substantially over the years. Our largest source of manufacturing quality related failures are U.S. made boiler castings (cracking and pinholes), followed by U.S. manufactured furnace heat exchangers. We won't cover some boilers with service contracts due to the high rate of failure.
Many installers and service techs are also using cheaper imported brass fittings on gas line, oil lines and tank or burner connections. These fittings often crack at the seam since they can't take the stress of too much torque, or crack due to freezing. They don't hold up like the heavier one piece U.S. manufactured forged/machined fittings which are often 3X to 4X the price, plus the more expensive fittings are often out of stock, quantities are low and/or they're harder to find.
When one of our suppliers stopped carrying some of the heavy high quality fittings, they said demand was so low that they couldn't justify the large minimum order to supply the few people buying the parts. The same thing happened with some high quality stainless dual filtration nozzles. We had to place an order of a couple hundred nozzles per size/pattern/angle range to justify an order and production run. .
Our supplier said we were one of only a handful of outfits using high quantities of many high end components. Most outfits and independents are trying to maximize profits and lower shop/truck inventory costs by stocking and selling lower quality components.
Failure rate on lower quality components is higher, which leads to more paid callbacks and repeat service, repairs and installations.
