The 14-day quote: where home-heating firms lose their replacements

A replacement boiler is one of the few big purchases a homeowner is told to make by someone standing in their kitchen. The firm that told them has every advantage: trust, access and a photo of the old unit. Public reviews suggest that many firms then lose the sale in the quiet days that follow.

The moment that should close the sale

An engineer services a boiler, finds it is near the end of its life and says so. The homeowner asks for a price. At that point the buyer has already accepted the purchase; the only open questions are how much and when. In a market where a like-for-like swap in Dublin is typically priced between roughly €2,200 and €3,300 including VAT¹, that conversation is worth thousands of euro to the firm in the kitchen.

Here is how one homeowner described what happened next, in a three-star review left on a highly rated installer's own Google listing on 23 December 2025:

"[The engineer] carried out a boiler service on Tue 21 Oct 2025. Took photos of the existing boiler. I called [the firm] the following day for [the owner] to send me a quote to supply and fit a new boiler. 7 days later, I had received no response, so I called [the firm] to chase up the quote. Another 7 days later, still no response."

That firm is well reviewed and the customer did, eventually, get a price. That is the point. The leak is not bad workmanship. It is the gap between "you need a new boiler" and a written, fixed price, and it happens to good firms.

It is a pattern, not an anecdote

We read 47 public reviews and forum posts about boiler replacement in Dublin, Louth and Meath in November 2026. The same story appears from the buyer's side again and again:

"I've contacted well over 25 companies in the last 2 months to try get my gas boiler swapped out with a combi, I'd say I've had 10+ not interested as are too busy, 7+ no shows ... and 2 that called out and said no problem at all, will send over a quote in the next few days, even followed up on a few things and never have a quote and stopped taking calls."

"I got a new boiler installed about 2 years ago and waited weeks to get a quote, until I told them I would get the boiler somewhere else."

"I contacted them via whatsapp weeks ago to ask for price and an appintment to change my hot water tank, they came back after a week asking what type of apartment I have I replied and from there they never came back"

The winners are described in the same terms, inverted. They answer first.

"Firstly [they] were the most diligent in getting back to us, secondly they were 1k cheaper than most"

"Initial contact was Sunday pm for replacement of boiler cylinder and TRV valves.[The installer] submitted estimate on Monday pm and work was completed on Wednesday"

And sometimes the firm that diagnosed the problem is not the firm that gets paid to fix it:

"Out boiler was switched off by [a national energy supplier's] servicing due to a faulty flue. The boiler was rather old and we could not source the required parts, so we decided to replace it. The guys from [another installer], even though they were booked solid for weeks, managed to replace our boiler within just a few days of first contacting them."

Why it happens

None of this is a mystery to the firms involved. The constraint is the office, not the van.

• Quoting is manual. The owner or a single office person turns photos and notes into a price, between running jobs.
• The phone is the system. Requests arrive by call, text, WhatsApp and web form, and live in different places.
• Office hours are short. Many small firms list weekday hours only, while boilers fail and homeowners research on evenings and weekends.
• Peak season is the worst time to be slow. One boards.ie poster called "about 20 different plumbers and all said after Christmas before they could do it."²

Meanwhile, the price has gone public

Buyers no longer need the firm in the kitchen to tell them what a boiler costs. A Dublin price-comparison page that checked 34 installers and national providers on 22 and 23 October 2026 found that 19 publish a supplied-and-fitted price online, 111 packages between them, with lowest packages from €1,850 to €3,200 and a middle starting price of €2,499¹. A homeowner left waiting for a quote can find a fixed price elsewhere in minutes.

What the leak costs: an illustration

Firms rarely measure this, so here is a worked illustration. These are assumptions to be replaced with a firm's own numbers, not data.

If a firm's real numbers are half as good, the case still stands, because the cost of acting is small and the customers are already in the diary.

The fix: five design rules

1. Start the quote at the visit. The engineer leaves a QR code or a link; the homeowner sends three photos before the van leaves.
2. Price from the firm's own price card. Software reads the photos and answers, matches them to the firm's published rules and returns a fixed price in minutes. Anything uncertain goes to a person, and no price is sent until it is checked.
3. Meet the buyer where they already are. WhatsApp, not a twenty-step web form. Many buyers already message installers this way, and reviews show they notice when nobody replies.
4. Close in the same thread. Two fitting slots, a deposit link, a reminder the day before, and the RGI certificate and warranty registration back in the chat after the job.
5. Measure the gap. Track the time from "replacement flagged" to "price sent" and the conversion within 30 days. What gets measured gets fixed.

None of this changes who does the gas work. A Registered Gas Installer still surveys where needed, fits the boiler and signs it off, as Irish law requires³. What changes is that the office stops being the bottleneck.

Three tests to run this quarter

• Mystery-shop your own firm: ask for a replacement quote by phone, web form and WhatsApp on a Friday evening, and time the replies.
• Pull last year's service records and count how many flagged a replacement, then how many of those became your jobs.
• Publish one honest price range with what is included and whether VAT is in it, and watch what happens to enquiries.

Cite as: Tall Poppy Advisory, “The 14-day quote: where home-heating firms lose their replacements”, 3 November 2026, https://tallpoppyadvisory.com/insights/the-14-day-quote/. Corrections: hello@tallpoppyadvisory.com.