Did removing a radiator cause my boiler to go on fire?

Hi, I would wholeheartedly suggest you have a gas safe registered business look at this for you.

Sounds like the boiler safety device failed

You can remove any radiator and still use the boiler afterwards. Pipes should be capped. If they didn’t cap the pipes this would cause a leak and boiler to dry it’s self out which in my view looks that way. I would highly suggest a gas safe engineer to look at this issue but the builders look to be at fault here

Even if it was a coincidence, how can you leave heating pipes uncapped? The heating system will run dry. The builders are definitely at fault.

Removing a radiator would not cause the boiler to set on fire, quite the opposite. If you drain the water from a heating system the boiler would detect the loss of pressure and not fire up. I suspect you have an un related issue with your boiler

Call the boiler manufacturer and get them to send someone out.

If the radiator as removed and the valves left on and they were closed there would be no loss of system water. Unless they were leaking (they should be capped as a matter of precaution). If they system had no pressure in it or was empty, the boiler should have cut out or overheated and cut out. So the heating and the hot water wouldn’t have worked anyway, as there was no water in it. To me it does sound like an unfortunate coincidence, but builders are builders, not plumbing and heating engineers. I would always recommend that tradesman do what they are trained to do, you wouldn’t get a heating engineer building a wall just because he’s bricked a few flues up. Hope that helps.