All too often it's the installer who gets the blame when really it's the product that's at fault. Tim Wallace discusses the situation with John Hardy, product director with Ideal Standard, and bathroom fitter Billy Bennett from Pure Interiors in north Somerset...

John Hardy is product director with bathroom manufacturing giant Ideal Standard

Billy Bennett is a bathroom installer and owner of Pure Interiors in Clevedon, north Somerset

What are the biggest product issues for bathroom installers?

BB: Our main problem is with the imported products. We see WCs that have been made to look like Villeroy and Boch but they're nowhere near the quality. I wish they had some kind of standard. Most people buy a toilet, then when it leaks, they think we're doing a bad job. You spend three hours trying to make it work then you have to go and get another one. It's the biggest issue we have and we can't do anything about it. It's sometimes like having a Lamborghini with a Mini engine. Or like having a kit car. That's why I like to look at the product before we start ripping someone's bathroom apart. We advise people to buy Ideal Standard, or whatever, so you can take it back to the stores and they can sort it out.Would you agree that the UK is a bit of a dumping ground for substandard imported products, many from China?  

JH: I don't think it's a case of Chinese manufacturers looking to dump product. It's more that people are sourcing direct from China rather than going to reputable brands. Even the merchants are looking for direct sourcing to improve their own margins. Whether that's our fault for not pushing our brand, so they get their own product from China and make a bigger margin, I don't know. 

So what are the big fitting headaches with such products?

BB: It's all at the bare minimum of how strong it should be. You pick it up and it's light when it should be heavy and you know there's something wrong. Then you try to seal the taps and the plugs, the bit that goes in the pop-up waste. If that's not perfect, you end up putting more silicone in because that's the only way you can seal them because they're so cheap. You can't take it back to China and say it's leaking!

So you tend to steer towards what you know best?

BB: Yes, you know if there's an issue, they can always sort it out. If I crack something, I can get a replacement. But with the cheaper stuff, before you even start on it, you realise it's a problem. Even the colour match with the glaze can be a problem. 

John, from Ideal Standard's point of view, are these issues you know about?

JH: Don't get me wrong, we have Chinese manufac-turing sources, but then we employ quality control people who report to us and we pay their wages. So the quality issues are attended to - the shape of outlet holes, the strength of a product... Part of the issue is what I was alluding to. Some of the people getting involved weren't manufacturers before and think a toilet's a toilet. Perhaps they're not aware of all the quality control and design issues - that it flushes properly and fits together. That's what sets us apart from the no-name people.

BB: Yes, a classic example is when you get stuff with an 'inspected' sticker on it. The majority of decent stuff has that on it. But there's stuff that comes in and you know it's rubbish before you take it out of the box

So manufacturers aren't considering fitters as much as they should be?

BB:  No, they're looking after the people selling it, but that's not enough. Ideal Standard is quite good, you can ring the technical help line and they help you out, but it would be good if more people had the diagrams online. We had a classic example this week working for a shed. They turned up and there were a load of bits there that weren't even on the drawing or on the plan. They were all listed, but not exactly where they were meant to go. That's the difference you get with the shed stuff. The drawings are very simple, bits are missing or the drawing isn't big enough. But with Ideal Standard, you do get a proper drawing and you get the numbers and the size of the screws and all that kind of stuff. All I want is a brand name and backup. I think the sheds are where the issue is. You can buy a whole bathroom suite for £300, but what quality are we talking about?

John, what sort of efforts are Ideal Standard making to try to improve its relationship with the fitter?

JH: Even from the design stage, we are conscious of what the issues are going to be. We produce quite a lot of wall-hung closet bowls now, for example, because they're becoming quite a fashionable item. We do an 'elephant test', where we mount samples of the wall-hung bowls on a rig for an hour with a weight of 400 kilos. Similarly, with a wall-mounted wash basin with a weight of 150 kilos. If there's a hole to fix it to the wall, we make sure there's clearance for the guy to get a tool in there to tighten the screw. They're clearly in the standards, but whether anyone reads those standards is another issue. 

What else do you look at?

JH: An interesting one we're struggling with at the moment is the close-coupled bowl, where the foot of the closet goes all the way back to the wall. It almost gives you that wall-hung look, but it's mounted on the floor. Billy will probably ask 'how the hell do you install one of those? How do you make sure you've got a good connection to the waste pipe and how do you get the water pipe into the tank? You have to use a flexible hose and how do you get access for isolating it?'

BB: Yeah, in the old days you had a wall behind a cupboard that you could get into, but now you've often got a 1940s house, a brick wall, and you can't work in that. Perhaps Europe is different from us in terms of pipe work.JH: For sure, they're all solid floors and masonry walls, whereas we have a lot of internal walls. It's an interesting one, because I'm conscious that we're putting out more and more of these designs driven by what consumers want from a style point of view and presenting installers with a problem. I'm sure they have a way of overcoming it, but it makes the job more difficult than it would be with a conventional toilet. If you have a normal close-coupled unit where you can see the pipe at the back and get your hand in, then it's a lot easier than what we're presenting them with now. That's something we're working on with a kit of parts.

Are you finding that developments in design are leaving installers behind in some cases?

JH: There have been a lot of changes in showers, WCs, the advent of furniture etc, but the guys who are operating on a smaller scale tend to be a lot more prepared to learn and able to overcome issues. But we do tend to have an issue with the more time-served older ones, or people who aren't genuine installers.

BB: The problem is they change stuff and then we have to find out how we should be fixing or installing it. You go on the internet to try to sort out problems and you have to be a member of this and that. You want to ring someone up, or go on a forum, but the forums only work in the evening. They should give out paperwork, or you should be able to get to it easily on the internet. The biggest problem is that it's hard to find the backup. That's why we go to the merchants and they do the running around, but it would be a lot easier if we were on site and we could go online and find it ourselves - if we knew where to go. 

JH: We would love to see a qualification that means something. Along the lines of Gas Safe. Something that shows installers are making some kind of commitment and are delivering a minimum quality of service. How we establish that without it being too time-consuming or costly, I don't know. 

This feature first appeared in the current issue of kbbreview sister magazine KBB Installer