Advice needed, no room stat, strange advice given.

spinningsheep

Hi am posting on behalf of my mum and dad. They recently had a problem with their boiler, a Glowworm Ultimate 60BF installed approx 10 years ago. Turned out to be the thermocouple. £75 later, boiler running fine, serviced and cleaned too. My dad enquired about having the system hot flushed and a magnaclean fitted. He was told that in order for them to fit a magnaclean, it would have to go on the FLOW pipe, in the airing cupboard upstairs, as the boiler is in the kitchen on the wall and the filter cannot be fitted on the return pipework here due to the way the boiler was fitted? Also, they would have to remove their "summer valve". This is the bizzarre mechanism they use to switch between heating and hot water. It's basically a handle that moves 45 degrees to switch between hot water alone or heating and hot water. They control the times off a clock in the airing cupboard and all rads bar the towel rail in the bathroom have TRV's.

Also, they have been told to have a room stat fitted at the top of the stairs if they want one. I have said this is ludicrous, as they never have the radiators on in the hall or landing, so the heating will be on even more trying to heat the landing where the stat would be. I have suggested a wireless stat like I have, so they can control the temp in the lounge better where they spend 90% of the time.

Same installer who did my heating, and he is saying he doesn't rate wireless stats for reliability, yet he was quite willing to fit mine! And so far, no issues with mine at all.

Their heating seems a weird set up, anyone come across anything similar?

Cardew

Sounds like the CH system is much older than the 10 year old boiler.

The Summer Valve is simply a diverter valve, modern systems have a diverter that does that automatically.

It is now mandatory for room stats to be fitted - not certain of position on retrofit when modifications to CH systems are being carried out.

If you have no room stat in the property, having a stat in an unheated area of the house will make no difference to its current operation(assuming temperature never reaches that set on stat). i.e. the pump will run all the time CH is timed to be on, temperature of rooms controlled by TRVs, and the boiler will cycle - shut off when the circulating water is at the temperature set on the boiler and back on when the water temperature falls.

Although I have a room stat - in a largely unheated hall - I turn it to maximum and run it exactly as described above. The reason being that I don't want the temperature in all the rooms in the house determined by wherever the Stat is situated.,

bengasman

Your parents have a very old system with a "newer" boiler by the sound of it.
The description matches the old servowarm method with a manual dhw/ch selector, which is both very inconvenient and uneconomical.

The info you have been given about controls sounds like absolute rubbish.
Wireless roomstats that are of a good quality and installed correctly, are very reliable. I have been installing them for years without any comebacks.
The roomstat should go in the lounge, not in the hall or on the landing. Bit of a long story about the how and why, but you can find all you want to know about heating controls on the relevant page of my website. MSE will delete the link, so I can't post it.
You can find it by either checking my profile, or search for "fitting central heating controls London" on Google; it should be the first organic result that comes up.

Candy53

It's now mandatory for room stats to be fitted??

We are in rented house and have the old Baxi back boiler. We have no room thermostat. Should we have one?

Candy

HappyMJ

Candy53 wrote: »

It's now mandatory for room stats to be fitted??

We are in rented house and have the old Baxi back boiler. We have no room thermostat. Should we have one?

Candy

It's highly recommended but it's not mandatory in existing installations. They would fit a thermostat if they replaced the boiler.