Please, please help. I'm writing this on behalf of my 73-year-old mum who is having problems with her Ideal boiler. She has an Icos Ideal HE18 boiler which she's had lots of problems with since it was installed two years ago. If you could post some advice to me then I'd be eternally grateful....
To cut a long story short, there are two main issues:
1) How exactly should the boiler work?! When the central heating comes on, the boiler fires up for about 20 minutes and then stops, presumably when it reaches the temperature set on the thermostat in my mum's front room. Once the boiler does this, it switches itself off (rests) for about three minutes and then fires up again just five minutes later before switching itself off again. This happens continuously until the boiler turns itself off (via the timer) or it's turned off manually. Is this how the boiler works, with this stop-starting every few minutes once it reaches a temperature on a thermostat? It's not as if my mum has her doors or windows open - I would have thought that the boiler should be resting for a lot longer before it fires up again.
2) The boiler, until recently, was making a loud kettling noise. This seems to have now been remedied after one of many engineers I called out lowered the position of the boiler (there was a problem with the piping, apparently) and put some cleaning solution into the heating system which has now been drained out. Could the kettling noise have been anything other than gunk/debris or air in the system - ie a fault on the boiler?