WARNING: DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY'S SERVICES! This company provided an incompetent gas engineer who in-turn put our lives at risk-of-death due to a dangerous gas boiler installation!
I recommend you avoid Autumn Mechanical Services (AMS) at all costs, here is why:
We hired AMS in July 2008 to install a brand new Worcester Bosch Greenstar Highflow 440 combination boiler; we located AMS's contact details by querying Worcester Bosch's official list of registered installers. We later learned that this gave us a false impression that we were dealing with a competent company.
AMS sent an engineer, called Kevin, to do the installation of our new gas boiler. During the boiler installation, Kevin incorrectly installed Worcester Bosch's official flue kit. The flue kit has a set of external pipes which allow condensation and exhaust gases to escape safely from the boiler to outside of our house -- these exhaust gases contain carbon monoxide as well as other deadly gases.
We later learnt (in 2016) that Kevin was doing an apprenticeship at AMS, and had not passed his CORGI/Gas Safe accreditation at the time he installed our new gas boiler!
In October 2016, our boiler broke down and we requested an official Worcester Bosch gas engineer to look at it (as our insurance policy covered boiler breakdowns). The gas engineer sent by Worcester Bosch noted that the boiler fan had died due to condensation and exhaust gases not escaping via the flue piping and in-turn collecting in the boiler unit.
They warned us that the gas boiler was incorrectly installed, and even more importantly: carbon monoxide was leaking from the boiler into the kitchen each time we had central heating on or when we were using the shower.
With this in mind, Worcester Bosch deemed the installation as highly dangerous and immediately decommissioned it to stop it from being switched-on until it was re-installed properly.
We checked our installation receipts that AMS gave us in 2008, and we then contacted Gas Safe (previously called "CORGI") to see if the company and the specific gas engineer they sent was qualified to work on our gas boiler at the time of installation. We were told that the gas engineer, Kevin, had not yet passed his CORGI/Gas Safe accreditation and but was marked as an employee of AMS!
We then paid for legal counsel (as well as speaking to Citizens Advice Bureau) to see if we could take action against AMS via Northamptonshire county court (for negligent/dangerous installation of a gas boiler). We sadly learnt that our legal options were slim as the official Worcester Bosch gas engineer only detected the dangerous installation in 2016 (but it was installed in 2008), it therefore fell outside of the six-year protection that the Sale of Goods Act legalisation offered us. The newly enacted Consumer Rights Act 2015 legalisation did not apply to us as it only allows you to take a company to court for negligence if your boiler gets installed from 2015 onwards.
With no easy legal options to challenge AMS, we filed two formal complaints: one with Northamptonshire Trading Standards and one with the Gas Safe register.
With the above all in mind, I recommend you avoid Autumn Mechanical Services (AMS) at all costs. You are better off looking for a vetted company via the UK trading standards agency's "Buy With Confidence" web site.
