I am refurbishing a small 1980s house which has had 8mm microbore heating installed. I would like to bring the installation up to a good standard but need some guidance from those more experienced with such systems. First, some background:
- The old cast iron boiler has been replaced by a Vaillent ecotec 415
- I have replaced all the old radiators by compact style ones with Danfoss TRVs (except the rad closest to the thermostat)
- I am shortly to replace the existing gate valve bypass by an automatic type
- There is clearly sludge in the system as I am getting blockages to the radiators at the front of the house. I have overcome these so far by back flushing with mains cold water via the drain valve on the lounge radiator but I think its quite marginal as to whether it recurs.
I would like to reduce the sludging/blockage problem and am considering the following but don't know which is going to be best:
- Fitting the pump back to front and trying to pull sludge back from the blocked manifolds (danger it all ends up in the boiler?)
- Using Fernox F3 or similar to clean the system (is it really effective?)
- Fitting a Magnabooster (or equivalent). It's almost impossible for me to fit this in the return to the boiler without blocking access to the boiler, but I could fit it just before the pump in the flow pipework. As I am most concerned about muck entering the 8mm microbore flow pipes this strikes me as the best option. Comments please??
I would really appreciate any advice on how to proceed. I obviously don't want to make things worse and have read elsewhere that power flushing a microbore system is a really bad idea so am not considering this.
- The old cast iron boiler has been replaced by a Vaillent ecotec 415
- I have replaced all the old radiators by compact style ones with Danfoss TRVs (except the rad closest to the thermostat)
- I am shortly to replace the existing gate valve bypass by an automatic type
- There is clearly sludge in the system as I am getting blockages to the radiators at the front of the house. I have overcome these so far by back flushing with mains cold water via the drain valve on the lounge radiator but I think its quite marginal as to whether it recurs.
I would like to reduce the sludging/blockage problem and am considering the following but don't know which is going to be best:
- Fitting the pump back to front and trying to pull sludge back from the blocked manifolds (danger it all ends up in the boiler?)
- Using Fernox F3 or similar to clean the system (is it really effective?)
- Fitting a Magnabooster (or equivalent). It's almost impossible for me to fit this in the return to the boiler without blocking access to the boiler, but I could fit it just before the pump in the flow pipework. As I am most concerned about muck entering the 8mm microbore flow pipes this strikes me as the best option. Comments please??
I would really appreciate any advice on how to proceed. I obviously don't want to make things worse and have read elsewhere that power flushing a microbore system is a really bad idea so am not considering this.