Why don’t the installers heat trace the condensate pipe when installing boilers. It would cost in the region of £25 and would save a lot of central heating ‘breakdowns’.
A friend who has an 94 year old mother has got this problem andin spite of the fact she paid to have a trace fitted and has no heating or hot water. In spite of a £50pm maintenance contract with British Gas and the fact she has a vulnerable elderly relative she was unable to get through on the emergency line on Wednesday. When she did they said they did not lnow when they would be able to call. She has had to resort to getting a private installer and the earliest he can make is Monday morning. Condensing boilers may be efficient but there is far more to go wrong than the old boilers like the Glo-Worm Hideaway we used to have. A clean of the burners and the occasional new thermo couple and it was bomb proof.
Grrr..........been the ruination of my day today - has this friggin condensation pipe. The engineer (from the safety of his own home) advised me to get on a ladder with jugs of hot water to unfreeze the new pipe he'd stuck outside. What happens in e.g. Iceland? (the country btw, in order to head off wits at the pass)
Just a quick tip, though anyone with this problem, may already know so. But if your boiler packs in, due to a frozen condensate pipe, warm it through with a hair dryer and your boiler should soon fire back up. If you're bald, and therefore don't own a hairdryer, you'll sadly have both a cold house and cold head for the foreseeable.
I’ve had the boiler on since last Thursday constantly and had no problems what so ever. So hopefully it stay that way.
The quickest way to get a condensing boiler back to work that has stopped because of a frozen condensation outlet pipe is to disconnect the pipe and stick a bucket underneath the boiler and just let it condense out into the bucket. As soon as the boiler realises that its path out is clear it will start up again straight away. Temporary solution of course, but as soon as the temperature goes back above the right side of 0 the pipe can be plugged in again. I am not a plumber by the way - in fact you would be hard pressed to find anyone less capable than me in anything resembling a manual trade. Its just that it happened to us this week in our rented out house and it was the advice given to us over the phone by the heating engineer - and it worked a treat. The bucket is still in situ as we speak. Its only got a couple of cm of water in it - will take a week to fill it, by which time we will have plugged the pipe back in.
That's exactly what i did about 5 years ago: and the bucket's still there today. Hardly a chore to go up in the attic once a week in winter to empty it, 2 minute job.
My boiler packed in Tuesday, new one not fitted till a week at earliest, told wife n kids this is what we did in old days before we all got soft and had central heating . Boiling water on oven to wash up n a strip wash , and upto mi mams for a shower ... electric bill should be nice next month
Wow! A boiler enthusiasts' thread! Now then chaps, I have a Glowworm Space Saver which was fitted when our house was built in 1982. So at 36, it is still trundling along, but will it be on borrowed time at this advanced age? It is working fine at the moment, but it is several years since the heating engineers began to tell us that we'd no longer be able to get parts for it. I've had it in mind that we might look to replace our system next year, when financially convenient. Should I act then, or run it till it drops? Dependant on the above, our house is 3/4 bedrooms, with 11 radiators in total. Would that be too big a load for a combi boiler? And would I therefore need an old style feeder tank/storage tank system? Any answers appreciated.
Morning mate. First of all, a Glow-Worm Spacesaver has so few actual parts inside it, that there is barely anything that actually could go wrong (gas valve, heat exchanger, possibly fan, unless its balanced flue) so I'm confident there's still life left in it. Any parts prone to failing (pump, zone valves) are external anyway so easily replaceable. If you do eventually get a combi boiler, your gas bill will drop. Don't believe the TV adverts that suggest 50% gas savings, but you will save. You asked if a combi boiler is big enough for your house. Definitely, yes, it will heat it, 11 radiators is no problem at all. It is your hot water requirement you need to check. If you have just 1 bathroom, get a combi boiler. If you have an additional en-suite, a combi boiler will still be fine, though one with a higher domestic hot water flow rate, though if you have an electric shower in there, that reduces your hot water needs. If you need more hot water, then you'll need to stay on a conventional system, and either keep your cylinder or upgrade to a mains pressured unvented cylinder. Not a fortune, but more expensive than a combi. Plus, if your cylinder is in an airing cupboard, if you get a combi, your hot water cylinder will be gone giving you extra cupboard space. Hope this helps pal.
I'm no plumber, but our system is a condensing combi boiler which heats the underfloor system we had installed when the house was renovated (this save money as you only heat to around 40C rather than 80 for radiators. As we have a bathroom with bath and shower , an ensuite with shower , and a cloakroom with washbasin the plumber fitted a 150litre hot water buffer tank heavily insulated. The boiler prioritises the Hot water over the heating system anyway (suppose they all do that) but with the buffer tank we never seem to lack for hot water. If we have been away it only takes the boiler about 5-6 minutes to heat the buffer tank from cold. Here in the rural area we often experience drops in pressure and on rare drought occasions the water supply may be stopped for a few hours a day (Only happened once in the last 6 years) but we have a 750 litre stainless steel sealed reservoir buffer tank that fills from the mains with a pump at the outlet that activates when you run any water to keep the domestic pressure up to the required level. The downside is that the lights dim momentarily when someone turns a tap on due to the initial power draw from the pump and the fact we only have a 6kw total supply. Works pretty well as you can turn a tap on in the kitchen without hearing any screaming and/or swearing emanating from SWMBO if she is having a shower at the same time. You do need lots of room though as buffer tank and reservoir together with all the pipework takes up a lot of space.
The diameter of the condensate pipe should be 32 mm (1.25 inches) according to the latest regs. The one in the video is too small. The larger size pipe will help prevent freezing, especially if it's lagged. A smaller diameter pipe can also lead to premature failure of the boiler fan. I know this to my cost!
We had a Glo Worm boiler- also told it was "indestructible"- and only replaced it because we lived on Park Road and qualified (around about 2011 I think it was ) for the boiier replacement grant offered by the council where they subsided an upgrade to your system at a fraction of what it would have cost us with a contributory payment from us. The house had 11 radiators and the new boiler coped easily and was fitted in the basement room where the old one had been. We were about to put the house up for sale anyway to move here and a new system with a guarantee, new radiator thermostats etc and the fact that the Energy certification rating improved made it a no brainer. The downside was the boilers are more complex and without the old hot water tank in the airing cupboard my wife complained there was nowhere to keep the towels 'aired'. We also experienced the temperature change if anyone ran water in the kitchen when you were in the shower which previously never happened. We did see a drop in the gas bills but it would have taken a long time to recoup the cost of replacing the old faithful boiler(without the grant) so his advise used to be if it aint broke why fix it
I really don't understand why they put the pipe outside. A failure waiting to happen - could it be deliberate so that they get loads of call-outs at £70 a shot?
Don't know if this will help anyone out of the s**t.....and if there are any heating experts on here that say it's a bad idea please take note of them rather than me. We woke up yesterday to a sizeable wet patch on our newly plastered kitchen ceiling...at first assumed it was the roof leaking but couldn't see anything wrong, as we were stood looking at it my neighbour came out ( who was a heating engineer) and said he had spent the morning unfreezing his own condensate pipe, and to check our connections inside in case it was leaking internally as our boiler was still working....he'd hit the nail on the head. The condensate pipe out of the boiler drops into the plastic pipe and is sealed by a rubber grommet... British Gas fitted ours 18 months ago but the rubber grommet is leaking....so the boiler( in an upstairs bedroom) keeps working but the condensate is dripping onto the ceiling below, a couple of towels around the drip and everything is drying nicely . In my case the down pipe is flexible, I could pull it out of the grommet and let it drip into a bucket so it might be a tip for anyone to see if you could do the same?
Plumbing Italian style looks complicated probably because it is!! In fairness it functions very well....
Hell's Bells Tekky!!! Like an old school boiler house. Have you ever considered a good old wood burning stove??!! Not much call for the buffer tanks or accumulators round Barnsley though as we don't suffer pressure drops as you'll well remember. Bet your local Italian plumber has a degree in engineering though.
