Moving to Switzerland, buying a home with another Vaillant boiler installed

When we moved to Switzerland in 2017, I was happy to see that the house we bought also had a Vaillant boiler.  As far as I could tell it was virtually the same ecoTEC plus line I had chosen only a few years earlier for our house in London.  It was an older model, installed in 2007, but I was confident about the quality.

In winter 2018, we got an error with the boiler.

We began seeing errors in February and in March it stopped working altogether.  My wife called in the local assistance for Vaillant boilers, VezzoliGas SA ( https://www.vezzoli.ch/ ).

The repair people showed up and before working required my wife to sign a form which stated she would be responsible for any costs.  Then they started working.  

They found problems which they claimed were related to dust from the next-door-neighbour's demolition works.  They assured my wife that owing to the clear cause of the damage, the repairs would be covered by the neighbour's construction firm's insurance.  The worked further, and got the boiler working.

Then the repair bills arrived.  Two bills for CHF 2422.85 and CHF 193.85 for a total of CHF 2616.7 (approximately GBP 2021.58).

I found it quite ridiculous that the cost to repair this unit was more than twice the cost of a new one which I knew exactly from having previously bought the UK version of the same product only a few years earlier.

I also found it poor customer service that we hadn't been provided with a quote up front, and possibly given the option to replace rather than repair the boiler.

The boiler technicians had promised us a report which we would be able to use in discussions with our neighbour's builders insurers.  That report never arrived.  I of course refused to pay the bill until the promised information was forthcoming.  Finally I wrote the following letter:

which was my poor Italian of the following:

Dear Madam / Sir,  Vezzoli SA,

You recently repaired our Vaillant boiler in via Minigera 34, 6926 Montagnola. During this repair which required the replacement of a number of parts, it was indicated that the boiler suffered severe damage due to dust from our neighbors construction site.

You promised a report on that damage so we'd have a chance to ask our neighbour for money.

We have now received your invoice from 10.04.2018 for a sum of parts which honestly seems to me to cost more than a new Vaillant VC CH 196 / 3-5.

But we haven't received the report yet, so we can't ask for our neighbour.

Can I ask for the report, or at least the photographers taken by your colleague?

After that I received the following report in the post:

We submitted this to our neighbour, who submitted it to his construction company, who in theory submitted this to their insurer.  Nothing came of it for months.  Vezzoli wanted their money and I refused to pay it until they completed facilitating the recovery of the repair costs from the insurance.  A big meeting was arranged with the head of Vezzoli, the head of the construction company, the architect, my neighbour and myself.  In the end, the builder's insurance refused to pay anything, but my neighbour was gentleman enough to pay half.  I paid Vezzoli's bill.

Overall, I was not happy with Vezzoli's way of working without providing a quote, without giving their customer a chance to make an informed repair versus replace decision and the promises they made about accountability which turned out to be false.

This experience in itself is not necessarily an issue with Vaillant per se, we'll get to that.  Normally I would just chock this up to a poor experience with a particular installer/maintainer, namely VezzoliGas, and under normal circumstances I would just choose to avoid them in the future and go with another service company.