Johnson & Starley Reviews 22

Dad had a warm air replaced about 5 years ago
Everytime it’s serviced it breaks down within a week.
On this occasion a pump was replaced within a month it failed. The part was replaced but the company that fitted it charged dad again for fitting the replacement.

We had to replace a 50 year old Brink 17D in a rental (a 1970 built bungalow, when both energy and concrete were cheap!) in Manchester, as no one in their right mind would certify it as safe. It was a workhorse of a thing and hardly ever went wrong. After a few phone calls and reasonable quotes we had High Efficiency Heating replace it with a Warmcare 16D. No complaints. The tenants are delighted; it heats the place very quickly and the gas bills are a lot less. After three years there was a slight issue with a timer, but Matthew at Johnson and Starley sorted it out quickly. It is a shame that warm air heating isn't as popular as it was. There are no pipes nor radiators to limit wall space for furniture, just discrete vents in the floor in front of windows.

Absolutely shower of a company. We installed a hot air system and now not even 10 years old the parts are obsolete.
But a new one is £8000.
DONT FIT JOHNSON AND STARLEY

We have a new C10D installed in the summer, replacing a very old earlier model. Unfortunately the fan on the new unit failed, but to J&S's credit they sent a replacement (under warranty) as soon as possible and arranged for an engineer to travel some distance on a Saturday to install it. We were please with the help from J&S's technical support department and the fast response.

We were looking to replace our old warm-air central heating unit and so we contacted the tech department of the manufacturer Johnson & Starley for their advice. They recommended Chelmsford Plumbing and Heating (amongst others) who came last week and installed an Aquair S10 unit plus boiler. Their work was professional in every way. Thanks for all your help!

Required a part for our Reno boiler and sent email request. Email was read, acted on, technical support advice and part ordered all within a couple of hours. A fantastic customer service.

Parts now obsolete for Hispec J25 so need to replace the complete system at a cost of over 5K. Defo looking at other heating alternatives as need something with a longer lifespan

I’ve been working on warm air since 2008. 15+ year warm air, Essex domestic & commercial INDEPENDENT gas engineer here. Look me up if you get stuck ‘Greenstar Powerflushing, gas, plumbing and heating’.

This warm air CONVERSION unit, is amazing. IF installed properly, they will last years. This one has been working well since April 2019 - 5 years, no issues. It has an 8 year warranty til 2027.

Any problems clients have is down to the ORIGINAL installation errors, and NOT the warm air unit ITSELF. - this is a great product, and I would DEFINITELY have one installed, if I didn’t have radiators.

Less problems, and fast heat up times. Just get them PROPERLY serviced (Approx 2hrs) YEARLY!

Please make sure the system is cleaned initially on installation, and checked yearly for sludge / scale & inhibitor (as per regulations).

- Technical team & advice team is 5 ⭐️

Five years ago we replaced an old (40 years?) Lennox G11 warm air system. It was reliable, although noisy, but Lennox (a large US manufacturer) had withdrawn from the U.K. and we had no idea if we would be able to get it repaired if a major part failed. We therefore made the decision to replace it with a Johnson and Starley C36D unit which came with a 5 year warranty.

We had problems from the start. Johnson and Starley engineers had done the set up after installation but it didn't work correctly - the unit cycled on and off continuously, even when the temperature was way below that set. It took us a long time to get two Johnson & Starley engineers to come and fix it.

Three winters ago the unit stopped working in mid-winter. Our installer, who had done the annual maintenance on the boiler, knew that it was a failed condenser pump (because he had had many other similar failures) but was unable to carry out the repair because it would have invalidated the guarantee. It took two months for J&S to get an engineer to us and all that time we had no heating. The engineer was on his very last job before retirement

Last winter the unit stopped working again - still under guarantee. We called our installer who told us that J&S no longer employed any service engineers of their own and now relied on installers to carry out repairs. Now followed two highly frustrating months, for us and our installer, while J&S, remotely, tried to find out what the problem was by trial and error. They started off by sending the cheapest components to our installer. When that didn't fix the problem, J&S sent some more components and then some more. It took two months and four visits from our installer to get the unit working again. The components were sent by mail and each took about a week to arrive. I offered to pay to have them sent by courier but nothing came of that. As our installer pointed out, if this had been, say, a Worcester Bosch boiler, a service engineer would have arrived in a couple of days with all possible spare parts in the back of his van and fixed the problem in a couple of hours. It took J&S two months.

Enough is enough. I looked up J&S's financial results and the company appears to be in significant decline. They are clearly having to put cost reductions ahead of customer service (as the ratings on this site and in Which surveys show) and may not be in existence when we have our next failure. In two of the last three winters we have been without heating for two months and we are not going to risk that happening again, especially since our 5 year guarantee expires later this year. This summer we are going to replace the J&S unit with a hybrid boiler/fan unit from reputable manufacturers.

We have a JWD38/50 J&S warm air heating unit that was installed in 1975 when the house was built. It has been serviced every year and has been little trouble. It heats our hot water, and our cylinder is adequately supplied for our domestic use. Since installation, we have had a new heat exchanger, various small parts that have failed (worn out, we would guess). Recently, the fan was making a lot of noise and eventually stopped working. An engineer came and said it needed replacing. A replacement fan was about £500 which seems a little expensive, however considering the time we have had this unit it must be worth using genuine parts. Fortunately for us, our neighbour had the same heating and decided to replace it for a combi boiler (about 10 years ago). I rescued the fan from their old system, it was fitted by our engineer, it works perfectly. We are looking at a WarmCair 16DW replacement and hope we get the same service from this unit.

If I could give 0 star review I would. New warm air system installed in Oct 2023 for my mother in law who has dementia and many health issues. Since installation it’s failed more than it’s worked. 3 visits from installation engineers and still not working at coldest point of the year. Is causing considerable stress for her and no compassion or understanding from Johnson Starley. No heating once again and no resolution in sight.

Exceptional Technical Help...!!!

I called up James in J&S 'technical support. I have a 'J&S Warmcair C26D'. He was extremely patient with me and slowly guided me through the necessary steps to find the fault (I am not a plumber, and this issue was resolvable by a layman, like me).
It transpired that the 'return air heat sensor' was at fault, which I bought through one of the national stockists and arrived the very next day.
Was very simple to fit thanks to the simple comprehensive instructions given by James.
He's a credit to the company and I cannot thank him enough......WELL DONE JAMES & THANK-YOU....!!!!!

(I do hope your employees J&S appreciate you as much as I do)

Warm air heating is possibly the best form of home heating. Only problem is it’s fallen out of fashion and there is only one UK manufacturer Johnson & Starley based in Northampton. They provide no after sales service or technical back up relying on a few dealers/service companies. Twice now I’ve had a problem with them. Whilst I’m a heating and airconditioning engineer I had no time to service the heating system so rang them to find out if they had any service dealers in Oxfordshire, yes they advised, and gave me a number, only to discover on ringing it the company was based in Luton and wanted £100/hour call out plus travel time!! The last occasion I emailed their support team to establish if there was a quick solution to flame roll out of the water heater inspection port e.g. lint trap, Pilot,burner or controller, rather than having to waste time stripping the water heater apart. No answer, apart from contact a service dealer, which don’t exist in Oxfordshire or anywhere near. Further to J&S response not much help from them, but solved the problem myself. Flame roll out is generally due to contaminated heat exchanger & vent blocked with dust, soot & grime. In J&S heated it’s a cheap poorly designed exchanger, just a loop of steel finned pipe, very difficult to access & service. I’ve a system to clean in situ but in essence the exchanger should be removed , but it’s a time consuming expensive job. Bad design. I made suggestions as to how they could improve their product but no response at all.

Poor experience. Have 2 properties with the J&S warm air system. The customer service is non existent. If anything goes wrong don’t expect support.

We needed to replace our 43 year old J&S warm air boiler. I contacted J&S and they sent an engineer to survey our house and give us a quote for a Quantec combi boiler and Aquair unit. All contact with the engineer was through J&S and I didn't realise that they were just a heating company and nothing to do with J&S until we got the quote. (We were not given a choice of engineers.)
Once the system was fitted, this is where the fun started. The boiler repeatedly started losing pressure and the pipes would rattle and bang in an alarming fashion. After the first call out the heating company (that J&S sent to our house) started ignoring us. I had to chase them for weeks at a time to get them come back and resolve the pressure issues. Each time they tried something new and the issue never went away. They even ignored repeated requests to carry out the annual services. This went on for over two years and the last time they came to try and fix the problem was only after I threatened them with the Consumer Goods Act. J&S took absolutely no responsibility for the company that they sent to our house to fit the system despite my repeated pleas for support. The only support we're had from them is names of other heating companies to try. (In the beginning, I was reluctant to try someone else as the original company that fitted the system should have been made responsible by J&S for making sure it had been fitted correctly and was working.)
We subsequently found someone else to service and repair the boiler. The pressure/banging issue was resolved, but with additional labour cost to us to fit replacement parts.
We've had about a year or so of respite and now that winter is here, the boiler has started cutting out with an F53 error code (as per reviews by others). We are now using yet another (actually fantastic) heating company to help us. They have replaced the parts as indicated by the error code (flue sensor and PCB) and the problem has not gone away. Having come back to check it again, seems that they need to replace a different sensor. It now transpires that J&S no longer make that sensor (even though the boiler is only a few years old) and the entire heat exchange unit now needs to be replaced - a four-hour job. It's astounding - how can it be that the guts of a boiler need replacing for want of a sensor?
Thankfully the boiler is still under warranty, but I dread to think how much it's going to cost to maintain once the warranty runs out.
It also amazes me that J&S don't have in-house engineers to diagnose persistent faults and they rely on third parties - some of whom clearly cannot.
The best thing J&S could do is recall that boiler and replace it with something else. Something that doesn't mysteriously break down on a semi-regular basis.
A final note: the Aquair unit is sold and marketed with a "summer air flow" feature. I imagined this to be a switch or something on the unit. It's not! You have to change over cables and open it up to change settings on the fan speed to make it work. Perhaps this is down to the fitters not setting it up correctly, but it's so complex that we are nervous of using it in case something blows.

We had the fan replaced on our 25 year old JB40-50 Modalair 2 boiler. The fan arrived very quickly and the installer fitted it saying he thought the boiler would last at least another 5 years. The fan was more expensive than I expected although it was a lot bigger than I expected.

Reading some of the reviews I'd like to add that Johnson & Starley have a list of installers if you ring them. These installers should have an up to date UK training certificate for warm air boilers. I'd assume J&S check that or the installers refuse work if they let it lapse as it would be illegal. We're considering changing to an Aquair with a combi boiler as the boiler is looking its age even though it still works well. The combi doesn't need warm air trained installers. The Aquair not having any gas presumably doesn't need a warm air certified gas engineer either.

We fitted a Quantec Combi boiler with an Aquair system back in 2016, the system ran out of warranty back in September last year and recently developed a leak in the boiler. I contacted customer service and explained the situation as the customer is disabled and vulnerable. J&S sent out a new part to me free of charge so I could repair the boiler for the customer. Great service and customer care.

Great system poor service. We as a family have the J&S system and it’s good and I chose to have this fitted to my 2nd property but the aftercare is poor. I’ve raised issues to J&S but outside warranty you are on your own which is a shame but I’d not use them again.

The unit is JSHispec 65 unit. Purchased Dec 2017 with 3 years guarantee. April 2021 fan packed up which given this is an air system is quite shocking and I got a bill for 777£ at my cost. If the system can only run for for a year and a half max without starting to cost the purchaser money I question the robustness of this offering.
I’m fine to share my entire situation but Johnson has been informed numerous times about this so I can’t see how the attitude will change. I live in a bungalow. Serviced the item every year and have not over used this system at all. I have spent nearly 10k with your company only to be shown the hand when I wrote in. Regardless of warranty I’d expect more than 2-3 years use out of a system before having to spend £1000 on a new fan. When I was exploring options I was recommended to install a superior Swedish system which I should have considered more seriously. If you want my details again let me know where to send these. I’m not seeking compensation which I think J&S is concerned about. But your after care needs to be called out and J&S need to seriously consider customers and aftercare as that plays a huge part for me when investing in a product. If you don’t have confidence in your own product and have to hide behind short term warranties your brand will sadly not be one of choice for many.

Thank you for coming back to me. I’ve provided details on my situation. I am not referring to labour costs. I’m referring to part costs. £777 for a fan on a system barely used over 24 months. I know J&S take no responsibility for that or their system which is my point. I’ve emailed you since this posting and heard nothing so I’ll leave this matter now but as I’ve relayed. Product good. Service poor. Which is a shame

Moved into a new build property in 2017 that has a Johnson & Starley QuanTech HR 28C boiler. Had intermittent problems with the boiler than after four years the boiler gets an error code of F53. Engineer comes out and is unable to fix it. The boiler is 4 years old!! I have now had to replace the boiler as Johnson & Starley only offered a two year warranty. A two year warranty. The one I have now is 10 years!!

We are incommunities tenants and our boiler is johnson & starley. Absolute pile of crap these boilers are. Last year we were 2weeks without heat or hot water till someone could fix it and it was winter! Today it's gone again ..thing is on incommunities website they have video showing how tenants can fix it themselves..ludicrous. The amount of call outs weve reported for our boiler surely costs more than what it would cost for a decent boiler! Its just a joke these boilers need scrapping . Not a happy bunny. Engineer booked for tomorrow..that's if he turns up. Johnson & starley sort ur crap boilers..incommunities get decent ones fitted. It happens too many times.