Gas central heating issue!!

C_Mababejive

There are many unanswered questions..
I know its immaterial now but who told you there was CO leaking from your old boiler? Perhaps you could tell us a little about that episode?

Moving on..Its true that the company were only engaged to replace the boiler. I think though that had i been engaged to fit the boiler, i would have carried out a cursory inspection of what was already there. Had that thrown up any issues, i would have highlighted it to the customer and quoted for further work or got them to sign a disclaimer.

Still its quite possible they didnt become aware of any such issues and cant be held responsible.

If your old system was very old then its possible your old system is a one pipe system.

If so, it really has to go and be re-piped.

GAP-p+h

The boiler will be have plenty of power to heat your system then and the pipe work sounds like it's sized properly, how often does it loose pressure? Is it each time the heating comes on so only has time to get the radiators warm before shutting down due to pressure loss?

angeljay

It was a while back, I believe it was a british gas engineer who told us about the boiler as it broke and they came out to look at it. I cannot remember much, it was not a combi and heated a water tank as well. It had a yellow sign hung on it when the inspector looked at it.

When the sales rep came he did tests on the water pressure and counted the number of radiators around the property etc.

GAP-p+h

And the boiler is a combi with only 3 pipes??

angeljay

GAP-p+h wrote: »

The boiler will be have plenty of power to heat your system then and the pipe work sounds like it's sized properly, how often does it loose pressure? Is it each time the heating comes on so only has time to get the radiators warm before shutting down due to pressure loss?

The issue with all the radiators not warming up is separate to the pressure, the pressure issue happened a bit in winter early this year and now. Only when the central heating is on, though out summer when I had the boiler on water only it never lost pressure.

The radiators not warming up has gone on for years, I find it I turn one radiator off completely this forces the water to other radiators which usually would never get warm if the radiator I had turned off was actually on.

angeljay

GAP-p+h wrote: »

And the boiler is a combi with only 3 pipes??

There are other pipes coming out the bottom one but the three largest width in pipes go out through the top of the boiler and connect into my system in the bathroom above.

I believe they had to pipe the gas from the original location which was under the stairs, under my floorboards of the bathroom to the boiler located at the back of the house, they would have seen doing this that the pipes were small and probably not plumbed correctly. They did not just connect to the pipes the old boiler was running on they moved the new boiler to the back of the house and plumbed it into existing pipes under my bathroom floor I'm assuming leading to my bathroom radiator.

unclebulgaria

As A rule of thumb you shouldn't connect more than three rads to a run of 15mm piping otherwise you run the risk of poor flow throughout the central heating circuit. Poor flow shows up by turning off one rad and then finding that the other rads heat up slightly better. This could be poor balancing or signs of a sludged up central heating circuit or too many rads running from incorrectly sized piping. Before installing a new boiler its essential you survey the central heating circuit and draw attention to any possible pitfalls before installation.

angeljay

unclebulgaria wrote: »

As A rule of thumb you shouldn't connect more than three rads to a run of 15mm piping otherwise you run the risk of poor flow throughout the central heating circuit. Poor flow shows up by turning off one rad and then finding that the other rads heat up slightly better. This could be poor balancing or signs of a sludged up central heating circuit or too many rads running from incorrectly sized piping. Before installing a new boiler its essential you survey the central heating circuit and draw attention to any possible pitfalls before installation.

This is the problem I am trying to note with the boiler installer they never reviewed the central heating pipes currently installed. They just moved the position of the boiler to the back of the house and installed the pipes into the current plumbing above it.


The 15mm pipes only seem to run to the radiators downstairs and not upstairs! The engineer did say changing these to bigger pipes would not solve the issue as there still will be no return to the boiler, he explained that turning off one radiator upstairs is just forcing the water downstairs hence why they then warm up. If all radiators are on upstairs the downstairs radiators do not warm up.


Also even though the boiler is below the bathroom at the back of the house, the first radiator to warm up when heating is turned on is the front bedroom it can take over 30 mins before the bathroom radiator has any sort of warmth into the radiator usually stone cold until then.

chickendipperbabe

I'm surprised they worked at all with no return feed.

As a side note you might you might want to re-consider using the Homecare Service. We had it for a couple of years, both fire and boiler paying around £260 per year and found it a mixed bag. They have issues sourcing parts for inset fires, they don't clean the inside of combi boilers, ours is in our kitchen and was a mess internally (grease etc) We swapped over to a local firm for half the price when we needed our fire replaced (condemned by BG as they couldn't source parts) the local firm was able to as the fire was a current model but the price was nearly the cost of a new fire so we replaced it. The more worrying issue was the cracked burner (the reason the fire was condemned) it had been cracked for 2 years and not picked up on during the previous two services by British Gas.

angeljay

I believe they have just connected the out and return to the boiler into the existing pipes above the boiler under the floor of the bathroom I don't think they actually have checked that it was a return otherwise I assume they would have mentioned this.


My plan is to show all the radiators not working, explain what has happened with British Gas and go from there. The system does not pump heat around to all radiators, even though the old boiler was in efficient and obviously had to be changed this did pump hot water around to all radiators.


We cannot get homecare because of the incorrect plumbing, this is classed as an existing fault and they will not set up our account because of this.