help - problem with condensing boiler!

brewerdave

Large pipe is the flue for exhaust gases - smaller pipe is condense - thats the one which might be blocked with ice - if you can get at it try the hair dryer trick then if it frees up, find some way of protecting it from the worst of the cold - old sacking or blanket wrapped tightly round it, then waterproofed with plastic sacks until you can get some proper waterproof insulation fitted.

payless

I disconnected the flexible pipe at bottom of boiler where it joins the 21mm condensate pipe to let it drain from boiler ( collect carefully as its acidic), the hot water on pipe - its been there 3 yrs with no problem, so seems the current cold climate is the tigger

PickleBT

On Wed night our condensing boiler packed up. Code EA. Pressed reset and it came on for 15 mins or so then went off and wasn't interested - seemed to be struggling - no gurgling noises. Phoned BG. Tried boiler next morning, came on for about 20 mins then off again, same error message. BG Came out next day, said pipe frozen, defrosted it, left, and 15 minutes later boiler not working again. Several hot kettles over our short piece of exterior condensing pipe to no avail. Could we get them to come out again that night - no - and first available priority slot was Sat am. Got home Friday evening to smell of gas. Disconnected supply. Sat am engineer arrived. I know he still thought it was the condensor pipe because he decided to saw off the bit of it that turns into the drain leaving an exposed 12cm or so just protruding out of the wall. Anyway, he was wrong. Several hours later it turns out it is something to do with the pressure from our gas tank - we are on LPG - and they can''t check that, so it's back to our gas supplier. BG think the regulator has gone or something. Gas supplier not able to get out until Monday. So here we are, 4th night without heating and hot water, ready for a 5th tomorrow, having spent a fortune on electric heaters that are of course no where near as good. So I hope for most people it is the fozen pipes. Does anyone know how much water-condense these things produce? Ours is a greenstar42. The thing is I doubt the original diagnosis because our condensate pipe follows the shortest route to the drain, but it is a long way - it is well over 4m of piping inside the house and I struggle to see that the blockage he says was at the end would have backed up the water to that extent to stop the boiler. Secondly, if it was frozen up on Wed night at 10pm and it worked again at 6.45 on Thursday morning, albeit it only for 20 minutes, how could a small section of the pipe have defrosted sufficiently during that time to let the water through when the temperature during those times will have gone down not up and was always below freezing. I seem to remember when it was installed the engineer saying they produced very small amounts of condensate a day - half a cupful or something springs to mind, but I have so far been unable to find any technical data, but sitting here in the freezing cold just gets you thinking!

mikey72

Should be in the book, my Ariston is rated a max of 2.2l/h, but that'll be on maximum hot water.
Worcester's drain in volumes of about 100ml at a time, not continuously. So if the end of the pipe run is blocked, it can airlock, so the condensate will back into the boiler, which will trip out, but can then drain later down the pipe run, so you can re-set the boiler until the next time the syphon in the boiler tries to drain and can't again.

How full is your LPG tank?

macman

LP pressure problem? What temp does LPG freeze at?

PickleBT

On Thurs am the tank was 15% full - it's a large tank - must be at least 1500 litres. Yesterday though it has gone down to 10%. Given the boiler has barely worked - 1/2hour in all of that time, that suggests a leak to me somewhere, but we will see if the engineer can shed any light on it tomorrow I hope. In the meantime, our electricity usuage monitor tells me I'm using £583 per month on our current usuage with the 4 electricty heaters on and still not warm.

mikey72

Sounds like you could have a leak somewhere, have you turned the gas off at the tank?

Wannabedebtfree

Had the same problem but with a Worcester Bosch ICC2, which has a reasonable size pipe which is fully lagged.

I've got the Homecare 400 and BG were damn useless, it took over 1 hour to finally speak to someone and when I did, they offered no solution other than we can get to you in 2 days. When they asked if my home number was the best contact one I said yes providing we don't die of hypothermia, and when asked if they could help with any else, I replied you could buy some heaters!

Never mind, I ended up looking on the net, gathered it was frozen and spent over 3 hours outside trying to thaw it out :T

ultramagnetic_commuter

Interesting to read this (although I found out the expensive way of having someone round). I had the gurgling flue and vibrating sound from condensing boiler before it went to fault code FL. I've lagged the pipe now but paranoid it'll freeze again. I was told by our engineers NOT to use boiling water over the pipe as it could crack it. Warm water is fine.

To those who have fixed this themselves, once you'd cleared the frozen pipe, did you just press reset and it was all sorted? Or did you have to power off the boiler of do anything else before it was 'fixed' and started working again?

Leon_W

Just had to press the reset button.

My mothers Worcester packed up yesterday with a frozen condensate pipe. It was installed 2 years ago and looking at it now I'm surprised the pipe run hadn't frozen before, it's about a mile long and rests horizontally along the ground until it falls in a drain !

Anyway, this thing was SOLID and there was no way that the kettle method would unblock this, so I've just cut the pipe off where the pipe exits the outside wall (it was backed up and i got very wet) and will fit a removable type joint for the future.

Regards