my girlfriend's having her kitchen done out and has elected (for some reason beyond me) to keep the monsterous old boiler in the kitchen.
the hot water and central heating are allegedly controlled by a time switch on the wall but it's all fucked up.

the timer bit of it works fine, but the heating switch does nothing. when you switch the hot water side on, it also switches the heating on. there's a separate plug labelled "pump" which when switched on at the mains, in combination with the hot water on the timer switch puts the heating on and the radiators get hot. if that pump is switched off and the timer's switched on for water then there's no heating, but the hot water's fine.
(hope this makes sense.. it's tricky to describe!)

question is, how do i sort it out?

A: is the timer/switch fekked and the pump should be left on all the time and controlled by this?
B: is the timer ok and just wired up wrong
C: is it all just so ancient and crap that she should have taken my advice in teh first place and had a new one put in?

thing is, i don't want to spend out on a programmable control for the heating/water if it's never going to work, and just a hot water one will do.
worst comes to worst we could put the power for the pump on a time switch but that's a pain in the arse if we want to switch it on briefly just to warm the place up a bit.