mains water pressure to high for boiler?

andymitchell

I have recently had a Worcester combi bolier fitted and in the last few days it has started to randomly leak water. It seems to be coming from fairly high up inside the boiler and runs down various pipes before dripping from a couple of places at the bottom.

The pressure IN the boiler is fine, around 1 bar, and the boiler is working fine also.

The engineer came out today and reckons that the mains water pressure is varying on different days and is sometimes to high. When the pressure gets to high the boiler release valve will let the pressure out.

He says we need to buy some kind of pressure regulator for the mains in?

Any ideas, seems odd to me?

Thanks,
Andy

paulsad

Can you acces your stop !!!! easily - try turning on a cold water tap and slightly turning down your stop !!!! to lessen the pressure - you can guage it by the pressure coming out of the open tap

It wont let me put stop c*ck!!!

andymitchell

haha, you gotta love the langauge filters

Yeah thats a good point. I can access the stop c o c k and will give that a try.

andymitchell

That's a good point.

It was the Worcester-Bosch enginner that came out to look at it and advised on the valve. I was thinking of calling the water board and asking them to check my pressure. See if i can push the problem onto them

latecomer

I would phone up the waterboard and tell them you are having problems with the variation in mains pressure and ask if they can check/monitor it.

Canucklehead

Hi.


You need a pressure REDUCING valve fitted to the main after your STOPCOCK

Not always needed as a lot a homes don't have excessive pressure so not standard practice.


GSR

I'm not sure if this is the solution to your leak. But if you have very high pressure then it's well worth fitting to protect taps and their ceramic discs. The shock wave from a washing machine shutting off will produce seriously high pressure for a fraction of a second.

1984ReturnsForReal_2

paulsad wrote: »

Can you acces your stop !!!! easily - try turning on a cold water tap and slightly turning down your stop !!!! to lessen the pressure - you can guage it by the pressure coming out of the open tap

It wont let me put stop c*ck!!!

Restricting flow does not reduce pressure

andymitchell

Sounds like the valve will do the trick. It's not leaking all the time so it makes sense that its do with with the pressure varying on different days. I will ask the water board about it first, but looks like the value will be the best option in the long run.

Thanks everyone

Mayflower10cat

We had a leak fixed quite recently from our combi boiler. The replacement heat exchange plate hadn't been fitted properly by an incompetent plumber we hired in all ignorance..... He came back to fix it and no improvement!!! Quite suddenly the small leak became a spurting of water from the top/back down the wall. Finally we found a really good boilerman who sorted it instantly. He said that if your mains pressure rises above 3bar, it will find any loose fixings or connections and you've got a leak.

gas4you

High cold mains pressure will only affect the domestic hot water circuit.

It cannot affect the heating side, thus making the prv open and leak, unless you manually open the filling loop to increase the pressure.

I would say it is more likely to be an auto air vent that has scaled up and keeps leaking. This would be fitted at the top of the boiler, whereas the prv will be at the bottom.