Help! Advice please combi boiler pressure problem

Tixy

Hi

I have come home today to a problem with my boiler. Which means no heating - Brrrrr! Any advice welcome.

Its an old radiant combi boiler which I intend to replace in the spring.
Recently I have been having some problems with it and the water pressure has been dropping below 1bar now and then which brings on a 'water pressue' light and the boiler won't fire.
I rectify this by opening the fill pipe until its at about 1.7bar and closing it again - usually job done no problem.

Today I come home and instead of being just below 1 bar its actually right at the bottom of the scale (about 0.25 bar but its as low as this gauge will go). So I tried the fill pipe but this did nothing, the pressure needle didn't move at all and the boiler gurgled unusually.

Once before years ago I had a problem which I think (hazy recollection) was that the pressure had gone too high and there was water pouring out outside. I think that when this happened although we were told the pressure was high it was showing on the gauge as at the bottom?

So today I went to check the outdoor pipe but it had a frozen icicle on it and that pipe is frozen.

Any suggestions or ideas please on what I can do (other than call out an engineer!)

Cheers

cte1111

My aunt has had a similar problem with her combi boiler this week. She was recommended to try to defrost the outside pipe with hot water bottles and a hair dryer. It didn't seem to work straightaway but happily her boiler is working again today, so maybe the defrosting helped a bit.

inspace

We have had problemswith ours - the pressure gauge wont go up until you get the heating on I guess - ours was the outdoor condensate pipe freezing we pur lots of hot water (nearly boiling) and lots of ice fell out of the pipe and heating is back on now thank goodness.

Tixy

Cheers for the advice guys - well the outside pipe was frozen but has since been blow-torched and thawed, however now the fill pipe water goes straight to overflowing outside so I guess a valve has also gone.