How we verify fault codes

The order of authority

When two sources disagree, we go with whichever is higher on this list, and we say on the page if the answer differs between model generations.

1. Manufacturer technical and service documentation.
2. Manufacturer support portals and published service bulletins.
3. Trade body guidance — Gas Safe Register and the HHIC.
4. Interviews with engineers who work on these appliances daily.
5. Moderated reports from owners who have had the fault.

The first three are what every page on this site is currently written from. The last two are places on the list, not things we have done: no engineer has been interviewed for any page, and no owner report has yet informed one. A page will only ever list either as a source once there is a record of who said what and when, and the source list at the foot of each page shows only what that page actually rests on.

Owner reports, when they come, will never set a severity rating or a safety instruction on their own. They are useful evidence about how often something happens and what a repair actually cost, and that is how we will use them.

Facts, not wording

A fact about what a code means is not copyrightable; a manufacturer's expression of that fact is. So we read the documentation to establish the fact and then write our own explanation from scratch. We do not reproduce manufacturer code tables, we do not copy sentences, and we do not host their PDFs.

Each page records internally which source types were used. Those types are disclosed publicly at the foot of the page. We do not publish scraped source URLs, because a link to a document we do not control is a broken link waiting to happen and implies an endorsement that does not exist.

Safety defaults

Any code that touches gas combustion, the flue, carbon monoxide, or an electrical fault inside a sealed unit is rated "stop — call an engineer" by default. That default can only be lowered by a qualified reviewer, and the change is logged against their name. With no reviewer appointed, it has never been lowered.

Pages at that rating never show do-it-yourself steps and never carry how-to structured data, because telling a search engine there is a home procedure for a gas fault we have just told you not to touch would be both wrong and dangerous.

What review we have, and what we do not

No engineer has reviewed any page on this site — not for gas, domestic appliances, refrigerant work or electrical installation — and we would rather publish that sentence than a byline that is not true. Nobody here holds Gas Safe Register registration, and no page, no page description and no piece of structured data on this site says otherwise.

There is a named author — Andrew Pickett — and naming him changes nothing about the sentence above. He is not a registered engineer, not a registered electrician and not F-Gas certified, which his own page says in as many words. The byline on every content page carries "not reviewed by an engineer" beside his name, in the same panel and at the same weight, so that a name is never the only thing you are given. What a named author gets you is somebody accountable for the method described below, which is a smaller thing than a review and a real one.

What sets severity today is the manufacturer's own published instruction. Where their documentation says isolate the appliance and call someone, the page says that. Where they publish a remedy an owner can carry out, the page publishes it and nothing more. Where they publish no meaning for a code at all, the page says that too rather than borrowing one from a repair forum. That is a defensible way to work. It is not the same thing as a competent person reading the page, and we do not describe it as though it were.

We publish these pages rather than hiding them, and we think that is the right call. Somebody typing a fault code into a search engine at eleven at night is going to read something. Better it is a page that tells them what the manufacturer actually says, what it does not say, and that no engineer has checked it, than one of the many that will confidently invent an answer and disclose nothing.

What we will not do on those pages is give you a procedure. A page rated "stop — call an engineer" carries no do-it-yourself steps and no how-to structured data, whether a reviewer has read it or not. That rule is the one that actually protects you, and it does not depend on anybody being appointed.

Review cadence

The date a page was last updated is shown on the page. We re-check pages against the manufacturer's current documentation at least every 18 months, because manufacturers revise manuals, redefine codes and withdraw them. Once reviewers are appointed, anything rated "get it checked" or above will additionally be re-reviewed on that cadence, and a page whose review date has slipped will be pulled from the index until it is looked at again.