Boiler Problems: How To Fix a Frozen Condensate Pipe

laurieabc

Mine was frozen solid at beginning of the month, had the engineers out they cut the pipe at the boiler and now this drains into a bucket which gets emptied everyday, they will re connect the pipe after all the bad weather passes.

The following morning following morning after they had cut the pipe the boiler failed to ignite called them back out and they opened the casing there was a build up of water in there which was caused by back pressure because of the frozen pipe which damaged the gas valve, finally after 24 hours it got fixed, they had heck of a job getting the gas air ratio correct, following the fitting of the new valve.

skintbuttrying

My combi boiler started playing up on Tuesday. A call to the heating engineer found him in bed with man-flu. There followed the sureal scene of holding the phone up to the boiler so he could hear the gurgling, hics and glugs made by the boiler. "Sounds like the fan" he says, "I'll have to order one. Should have it tomorrow".

Just in case rushed out and bought a convector heater and thought must remember to tell all guests on Christmas Day to breath heavier for more heat.

Next day visited the chiropodist and related the tale of woe to her. " Oh", she said, " I'll be the condensate pipe. It gets frozen up this weather with the continual drip, drip, drip of water. My husband has had to thaw ours out 3 times already in the last week or so".

"How did he do that?", I asked quizically.

" He poured a kettle full of boiling water on it. Chunks of ice fell out. We re-set the boiler and Bob's your uncle - heat!"

I tried this as soon as I got home. It worked a treat. Re-set the boiler and boom off it fired and the radiators were soon piping.

Also tried it on my elderly neighbour's system and it worked a treat there as well. British Gas are due to see her today and she won't half lay into them as the installation manual actually stipulates that all external pipework should be lagged. Needless to say neither hers or mine are.

By the way rang our heating engineer. No spare part and still in bed!

I'm just going to ring our butchers now to ask him if he can give me some advice on how to fix my tumble drier!!!??

WhiteHorse

The condensate pipe on my boiler emerges from the wall for only couple of inches. That's lagged. It then goes into and drips into a much larger bore pipe (theoretically too big to freeze solid), which bears it away.