Recently our Worcester Greenstar boiler became unable to start.
The solution turned out to be that the plastic flaps on the bearing plate had degraded and fallen apart, so the plumber simply removed it.
The boiler is now running fine with the fitting for bearing plate currently sitting on top of our microwave, so it doesn't seem to be critical for standard operation...
My questions are: 1) Is the boiler safe to run without a bearing plate? 2) How urgently should we be trying to replace it? 3) What does it do?