Keep Above
Repair or replace the boiler
A boiler that's stopped heating, or limps between breakdowns, leaves the standard pair: repair this one or replace it. Put in what the fix would cost with the extra years you'd expect from it, and a replacement with the years it would last — each is spread over its own life to a cost per year. No winner is declared; the estimates and the call are yours.
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Comes off the replacement
Put in what the fix would cost and what a replacement would cost. Nothing here is read from your budgets, and nothing is saved.
| Repairing | Replacing | |
|---|---|---|
| Up front | — | — |
| Running costs over its life | — | — |
| Total over its life | — | — |
| How long that covers | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
| Cost a month | — | — |
Why does a boiler fault take out the hot water as well as the heating?
On a combination installation one appliance does both jobs: it heats the water going round the radiators and it heats what comes out of the hot tap. A single failed pump, valve or board can therefore stop two things at once, while on a system with a separate cylinder the same fault may stop only one of them. Which arrangement is in the house decides what a breakdown actually costs in use, and the page sees none of that — only the repair figure you enter.
It also makes the running-costs boxes harder to fill than on an appliance with one duty, because whatever goes in them has to cover both across a whole year: heating that runs hard in one part of it, and hot water drawn every day of it. The box takes a single yearly figure, so those two patterns are folded into one number before the page ever sees them.
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
A replacement arrives as one bill on one day, which is the kind of expense a sinking fund exists for — how budgeting apps handle money set aside for later bills.
About this calculator
What counts as the repair cost for a boiler?
The whole of the quote — call-out, diagnosis where it's charged, the pump, valve, heat exchanger or board that failed, and labour. The cost per year spreads that full amount over the extra years you think the repair would buy.
What goes into running costs a year here?
Where the old boiler and a replacement would use noticeably different amounts of gas or power across a year, that difference belongs in the running-costs boxes; servicing that only one side would need belongs there too. Where both sides would cost much the same to run, $0 in both keeps the comparison to the up-front figures.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the boiler for its cost per year to match the replacement's — a position in the arithmetic, nothing more. Where the old boiler already takes more each year to run than the replacement does all-up, no length of service would bring them level, and the line says so instead of showing a number.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old boiler would fetch comes off the replacement's cost. There is no field for the work of taking it off the wall, so this box is only ever what the old unit itself would bring, which on a wall-mounted boiler is a scrap figure or nothing; at $0 it drops out of the arithmetic.