A gas boiler MUST be serviced every year (or two?) and the relevant tax paid. Same for oil (diesel) boilers. In practice, gas boilers are easier to monitor as you have a gas bill, whereas oil boilers can disappear from the books if they are very old.
My father was of the opinion that it was cheaper to pay the fines, and, in fairness, the two gas boilers here were last serviced (until now) 7 and 11 years ago. As actually catching up with people is slightly beyond the Italian government at times, and, as it often it takes over 20 years to take a court case to fruition (by which time the crime is deemed to have expired), fines are not always paid.
The oil boiler does not meet current energy efficiency standards so cannot be deemed fit to use. Since it is 49 years old, it seems to have been forgotten about, and since it cannot be serviced officially, I have to clean out the heat exchanger as no one else can do it. Quite how it can be forgotten about when I ordered 1000 litres of low temperature diesel @ €920 delivered this winter (price subsidy obtained by showing my identity card due to being in a non-methane area), I don't really understand.
An oil boiler cannot be in the house as such : it must in a separate room that can be accessed from an external door only.
The interesting thing is that quite a lot of the requirements, including energy effieciency, are retrospective and there are no grandfather's rights. So there must be a programmable thermostat (or separate programmer, presumably) and minimum efficiency levels.
After the service, you have to pay a specific separate tax and the boiler logbook has to be updated. They ask the cubic metres of the house, but, in practice this information gets made up as nobody cares provided the form is completed. Recently, the logbooks were all renewed as a new design came in, so that gives service technicians more paperwork as they completed new logbooks for everyone. In my case, the tax was paid by the guy who did the service on my behalf (I think!).
The Italian government will pay you back for a lot of the costs of boiler replacement. I'm not sure if they discount that off income tax or give it to you. Apparently, what you can sometimes do is find a firm that will do the work essentially for free and you give that firm the government incentive. The problem is the level of paperwork is offputting to the extent (and sometimes the government just says, sorry, we ran out of money for this incentive) that my father preferred to keep the 50-year old diesel boiler rather than replace it. A new gas combi to connect to existing fan coils for the shop was quoted at around €6000 due to the cost of a new stainless steel chimney to the roof above the second floor being required.
I'm not sure exactly what tests are done during a gas service and inspection here. They seem to clean the boiler, FGA, and inspect the internal flue IIRC. Obviously not the external 🙂 . I can only imagine there is so much paperwork that they make most of it up back at the office afterwards - the firm I used has two technicians, but it has its own office with a lady behind the counter for the entirety of a normal working week, so I can only assume the administration takes as long as the service!
