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Ideal boilers

View the thread, titled "Ideal boilers" which is posted in Boiler Advice Forum on UK Plumbers Forums.

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hammers4spanner

hammers4spanner

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Bestest boilers ever !!!
From now on i will fit them because they are the best boilers and it makes me happy fitting them

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You're going to love this Hammers.

We have been running a survey of gas engineers, asking about boiler manufacturers pre-sales support, technical support, aftercare, build quality, ease of installation, availability of spares, value for money and a whole host of similar questions.

Thanks to the very many forum members who filled out a frankly very long and boring questionaire. We had several hundred responses from verified gas safe engineers.

My colleague Paul Jepson completed the analysis today, and I have seen the early numbers.

Our final three questions were:

If you had a friend or relative who needed a boiler* and were on a very tight budget, which make would you recommend?

If you had a friend or relative who needed a boiler* and were on a mid-market budget, which make would you recommend?

If you had a friend or relative who needed a boiler* and money was no object, which make would you recommend?


In the budget category, Ideal have a narrow win, just ahead of Main, Glowworm, Ravenheat and Heatline.

In the mid-market category, Ideal are clear winners with Baxi a poor second.

In the premium category, Vaillant win, with WB a close second and everyone else nowhere.


*there were three versions of this question - relating to combi boilers, system boilers and heat only boilers. This post refers to combi boilers only.
 
Hmmm. these questionaires are obviously to your (williams and co) customers...

Id have an issue with a questionaire such as that, especially with baxi as you dont sell them - at least the decent ones or have access to the full range - so they may not be in the engineers psyche at all of the competing price levels, or if some customers wear blinkers and by and large mainly deal with williams and co other brands such as vokera etc may be forgotten.
Id hardly call a baxi 400 mid range. and they may be thinking in terms of what you do sell which arent the best baxis being honest.

Im sure youll come back with an argument. But in mid range (duotec) and higher end (platinum) you don't have a competing baxi.

Surely to validate this. You would have to ask the question in relation to the choices............

Why ?
 
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I don't think Ideal have much competition in the mid category . You also can't argue about ease of install with a Logic it has to be one of the easiest fits .
My concern is the back up if i recommend a certain boiler to the customer i want to know that the manufacturer will be out to repair.
They don't turn up until a week later and when they do they look for to many excuses which after this week the rep basically listed many excuses not to honour a warranty.
 
Read in a trade mag this last couple of days that one in four boilers fitted in 2016 was an Ideal. It's either an arrogance at its sales or maybe it can't cope with the amount of sales and the long warranties offered. Was told by a major boiler manafacturer while on a course several years ago that boiler warranties would be offered up to 15 yrs but that it would be on the back of dismissing most of the callouts due to poor installation as they couldn't afford to repair all for nothing under warranty. Either way , backup is personally one of the main priorities for myself.
 
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newcastle phill said:
Hmmm. these questionaires are obviously to your (williams and co) customers...
Click to expand...

Not really. Although we did email our database (which is a significant fraction of the entire number of registered gas engineers and includes many thousands who don't actively trade with us) most of the responses came from Facebook groups which have no connection to us other than the fact that we are active in them. We did get a number of answers from members of this forum, which we sponsor, but is not limited to our customers.

If there is a bias, I suspect that it is towards digitally active installers - who may have a younger age profile that the whole population (although I wouldn't bet on that these days).

newcastle phill said:
Im sure youll come back with an argument. But in mid range (duotec) and higher end (platinum) you don't have a competing baxi.
Click to expand...

Ravenheat (budget), Potterton(mid market) and Atag (premium) all come out pretty well in the survey, despite the fact that we don't stock them, and in the case of Ravenheat and Atag, we never have.

Also, if it was biased towards Williams customer preferences, then Worcester should have hammered Vaillant in the premium category, as we sell very significantly more Worcester than Vaillant. But they didn't.

newcastle phill said:
Surely to validate this. You would have to ask the question in relation to the choices............
Click to expand...

When we publish the full data regarding build quality, ease of installation, ease of service and all the other sub-sets of data, you will see that we separated out the models within brands, so we asked specifically about Ecotec Pro
separately from Ecotec Plus, Duotec separately from 200/400 and so on across all the manufacturers.

Items like rep support, tech support and pre-sales information are dealt with by brand, not model, as your Worcester rep is the same person whether you fit entry level boilers or CDis.

We also controlled for experience - at the very start of the survey, it asks what models the respondent has installed or serviced in the last 12 months, and then only asks questions about those models. This was an attempt to distinguish current experiences from biases based on past models or behaviours.
 
woodsy said:
Read in a trade mag this last couple of days that one in four boilers fitted in 2016 was an Ideal. .
Click to expand...

I think that this is a slight exaggeration, but not by much. I reckon they had about 23% or 24% market share, compared to Worcester on about 31%. Its not clear whether Vaillant group have fallen from 2nd place to 3rd, or whether they have fallen behind BDR Thermea (Baxi etc) as well.

Bearing mind mind that Ideal market share was somewhere between 6% and 8% at in the Icos/Isar days, they have done quite well for themselves. Anecdotally, it appears that they might have outgrown their capacity to service it all. They have also changed owners - having been sold off to Groupe Atlantique a year or so ago. That transaction would have soaked up a lot of senior management time.
 
I was yapping to local plumb center manager few months back and he said Ideal were the main boiler that they sold through their doors closely followed by worcester.
The main selling point for ideal is that it's well priced and on paper a supposed 7 year warranty.
However spend a bit more get a worcester and any issues within 24 hours your up and running again.
 
So what was the aim of the survey at the outset ?
All of this data proves what most already know ?

People/customers generally go for the price range that suits their budget with the longest advertised warranty from a name theyve heard of.
Thats always a big decider from callers to me - the warranty length and brand name.
Hence some brands with 10 to 15 year warranties still struggle because of brand recognition and no amount of pursuation powers help.

10 different plumbers will have 10 different motives and often market driven incentives. We see it all the time on here - often boiling down to comfort zone and not quality with demographics playing a big part - mr clunes in his 560k house isnt going to have a biasi...

Ultimately i imagine it all adds up to market share.

The answers you get will mimic your sales graph to the people you sell to based on what you stock and at what price if you all of a sudden dropped £150 of a worcester for 3 months- guess whats gonna happen...

These will change from supplier to supplier as they have negotiated better terms based on what they knock them out for. And again a survey like this would largely mimic their sales graph.

Collectively when you add up everything else and who recommends what and fits what - will add up to overall published market share figures.

It cannot add up to objective quality - as every engineer has not fitted every boiler - and also every boiler fitted that has gone faulty - only a small portion of the installers may ever find out about subsequent breakdowns with many customers getting onto the manufacturers for subsequent repairs. So again data and opinion from installers could sway hugely if they were made aware of every breakdown based on their install.

So everything (recommendations) boils down to money imho and profit. If i was gonna make 800 on an ideal and 250 on a baxi theres no way id push baxi. Which is the same reason you dont sell them all.

Sorry typing this on Tapatalk and can only see 5 lines of text at a time so hope it makes sense. (Difficult to go back and forth to edit so it reads well)
 
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newcastle phill said:
So what was the aim of the survey at the outset ?
Click to expand...

It is for commercial gain, but absolutely not the way that you are looking at it Phill.

Our marketing team want both our current customers and prospective customers to read our emails and other marketing material. They know that if we mix in some general interest material with direct advertising material, we get better attention than if its all pure sales-pitch.

Also, stuff like this increases our brand recognition when we open in a new area. "Who are Williams? Oh yes, they are the guys that run the state-of-the-trade survey and the boiler survey.

Finally, via this sort of survey, we get vital market information about trends. Generally, stocking profiles are based on historical data, which looks backwards, not forwards. Installer sentiment is a much better indicator of future behaviour than looking at last years figures. Nailing that difference translates into real money for us.

newcastle phill said:
Ultimately i imagine it all adds up to market share.

The answers you get will mimic your sales graph to the people you sell to based on what you stock
Click to expand...

Absolutely not! As I mentioned higher up the thread, we sell MILES more WB than Vaillant, and yet Vaillant fares better in the survey. I suspect that the difference is because a) Worcesters specification team outperform Vaillant and b) their end-user advertising persuades householders of benefits that installers may not agree with.

newcastle phill said:
and at what price if you all of a sudden dropped £150 of a worcester for 3 months- guess whats gonna happen...
Click to expand...

You would be surprised. In the short term, mostly what would happen is that other merchants Worcester installers would migrate to us. The shift from our existing customers previously loyal to another brand would be very much smaller.

newcastle phill said:
Collectively when you add up everything else and who recommends what and fits what - will add up to overall published market share figures.
Click to expand...

Sorry Phill, but this is simply not borne out by the results. WB currently have a 32% market share, nearly twice that of Vaillant, who are strugging on about 17% to 18%. Yet Vaillant are more recommended by installers than Worcester are.


newcastle phill said:
It cannot add up to objective quality - as every engineer has not fitted every boiler - and also every boiler fitted that has gone faulty - only a small portion of the installers may ever find out about subsequent breakdowns with many customers getting onto the manufacturers for subsequent repairs. So again data and opinion from installers could sway hugely if they were made aware of every breakdown based on their install.
Click to expand...

I agree with you here. There is no such thing as objective quality - we could argue about that definition all day long. What we set out to discover is what brands installers recommend in each price bracket, and to gather some data on why.
 
I cant select parts of the post to highlight on tapatalk but some of your answers confirm what im saying - the worcester price drop theory...

Thats exactly my point. Everyone would start pushing them as there is more profit and as a consequence other brands market share wold suffer....

Worcester would go towards the top of the league table based on.....


Money

Yet they are no better or worse than before - just cheaper...
 
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Vaillant are more recommended than worcester on what basis.


And what percentage of those installers installed what ratio of those specific brands. And what was the basis for preference and were they self employed or contracted or employed.
Was it easier MI to understand, perhaps larger font for an elder installer easier to read?
Easier commissioning?
Got them for a better price?
Customer request?
And a barage of other data to establish the decision?

Have you got the answers to the why's?
I feel unless you fully understand the why's its pretty pointless and open to interpretation - as are most surveys we see be it brexit or whatever else polls...
 
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newcastle phill said:
Vaillant are more recommended than worcester on what basis.


And what percentage of those installers installed what ratio of those specific brands. And what was the basis for preference and were they self employed or contracted or employed.
Was it easier MI to understand, perhaps larger font for an elder installer easier to read?
Easier commissioning?
Got them for a better price?
Customer request?
And a barage of other data to establish the decision?

Have you got the answers to the why's?
I feel unless you fully understand the why's its pretty pointless and open to interpretation - as are most surveys we see be it brexit or whatever else polls...
Click to expand...

We have a lot of the background data that you mention. We asked what degree of influence the installer normally had over choice of brand or whether the customer was usually driving the decision. We asked whether they were members of loyalty schemes. We asked whether they were now, or ever had been employed by that manufacturer, or whether the manufacturer fed them leads. We asked subsiduary questions about pre-purchase information, ease of installation, build/component quality, ease of servicing, availability of spares, after-sales support, relationships with reps and a whole host of other things.

What we can't tell (because even the respondents themselves will not be fully conscious of it) is what is causal, and what is merely correlation.
 
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