Plumbing service plan worth it?

[Alex T.]

I have 2 triplexes near Boston that I self-manage. I've put in a lot of money into renovations mainly because initially it was non-stop repair calls. I now have new bathrooms, new boilers, new water tanks and yet I still keep getting frequent plumbing issues. Now as the winter is approaching I got 2 calls in 1 week about boilers that are refusing to start. Both of these boilers are about 3-4 years old.

Being an engineer by trade, I first decided to look at them myself in case it's something trivial. Neither problem was straight forward. I called several plumbing/heating companies and many were booked until next week. One suggested signing up for their service plan ($20/month per apartment) which includes one annual boiler checkup prior to the winter to avoid issues like mine and small discount on regular plumbing services (50% off of service call charge of $95 and 10% off labor costs after).

Is this something you guys would recommend? If not, do you manually service/clean your boilers annually to avoid these issues in the fall and manually call the plumber on case-by-case basis? I don't see this brought up much on the forums, but if even new furnaces have issues occur annually, I don't see how this would scale for people with more rentals.