My boiler fires up constantly

ljs_1985

I have a vaillant ecotech boiler which was new in 2014 when I moved in. Ever since day 1 if the heating g setting on the boiler itself is ‘on’ then it fires up pretty much constantly. It doesn’t matter if the wall controls are on a timer and heating isn’t due on yet, or if the wall controls are set to ‘off’, it still does it and the only way to stop it is to turn the heating off on the boiler itself. But obviously this then means I can’t have heating on a timer for the mornings etc.

The hot water is on all the time and this only causes the boiler to fire up when hot water is being used so the issue is heating specific.

I just want to know if this is normal or if I need to get a heating engineer out to have a look?

Thanks

Alfrescodave

Why not ask the engineer when he comes to do the annual service?

Browntoa

These boilers had both a hot water preheat system that fires up all the time to enable hot water at the taps quicker .

From memory you can turn it off , think you turn the hot water dial down on the boiler quickly and then out it back up to the temperature you want again. But check with the manual

onomatopoeia99

Browntoa wrote: »

These boilers had both a hot water preheat system that fires up all the time to enable hot water at the taps quicker .

From memory you can turn it off , think you turn the hot water dial down on the boiler quickly and then out it back up to the temperature you want again. But check with the manual

I have an earlier Vailant boiler and the hot water preheat can be turned off on mine by turning the hot water temperature dial all the way to its coldest setting, then turning it back up to the desired setting. It is turned on by turning the hot water temperature up to maximum, so if you leave the boiler on maximum hot water temperature, it will always be in pre heat mode. The pre-heat is shown as a letter "C" on the display if enabled (may be different on the OP's boiler of course, I have no idea what it stands for)

In pre-heat mode my boiler fires briefly every few minutes and the central heating does not come on.

rtodd

I would try the above suggestions about the preheat settings.

Also, as a more remote possibility that happened to me:
I moved into a house with a vaillaint ecotec boiler that was also firing up every 15 minutes or so regardless of the program and preheat settings. It turned out to be an installation problem.

The engineer who came out to diagnose the problem told us that the boiler still had a "boiler override switch" in place that should have been removed at the end of the installation process. After removing this switch, the boiler functioned as expected ever since.