Top floor radiators on three storey house won’t heat up

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I am having trouble getting the hot water in the heating system to the top floor of our three storey house and wonder if anyone is able to offer me some advice please? I have been running the system for the last couple of weeks with hot water gong to the ground and first floor radiators only so decided to clean and refill the system, thinking that if it was either an airlock or sludge I would solve the problem This is what I have done so far in terms of trying to fix the problem.

The system is I believe approx 30 years old and the boiler is a large floor mounted gas fuelled one on the ground floor in the kitchen. The water pipes coming out of the boiler are all large bore (not sure of the size) but reduce to 15mm for the run.

1. I have drained the system by turning off the header tank (there is a feeder valve and an exit valve)

2. I drained at the lowest point and opened the air vents on all radiators as the water level dropped below the radiator tops at each floor.

3. I refilled by adding the recommended cleaner to the header tank, closing the radiator air vents and turning on the header tank valves (the cleaner is still in the system and I believe I should leave it running on the system before I drain and refill for 7 days – it went in yesterday).

4. As the system refilled, I walked around floor by floor opening the bleed valves so air could escape. Note at this stage, the air pressure ceased building up on the top (third) floor radiators, so I turned the heating on, turned up the thermostat and went back around the system releasing air.

5. Once the radiators on the first and second floors had all heated up, I then repeated this process on the third floor. The radiators all took an extraordinary amount of time as I bled them for the air to escape, but as it did, radiator by radiator, I did feel hot water coming in to each third floor radiator, so I thought I had solved the problem. However, when I then turned on the hot water control so the boiler would heat water for the hot water tank, the radiators on the third floor all went cold and despite me turning the hot water off again a couple of hours later when the water in the hot water tank was hot and leaving the central healing system on, the radiators on the top floor did not reheat.

During the summer, we had the reverse issue with the third floor radiators as whilst the central heating was turned off, each time the boiler heated water for the hot water tank, the top floor radiators would all heart up. A heating engineer visited and insisted it was a faulty valve controller (the silver pipe mounted electronic box) and replaced it. This did not seem to solve thae problem and I eventually had to control; the problem by closing all of the radiators so that the only water that was sent to the heating system stayed in the pine run.

Any ideas/suggestions gratefully received.
 
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old systems can have a radiator attached to the hot water circuit also and acts as a kind of bypass, its unusual that the entire 3rd floor would appear to be linked though...
I'm not sure to be honest mate, I would have thought a faster pump speed or bigger pump would help get the heat round the 3rd floor quicker, and maybe a motorised valve was to blame also as your plumber thought.

best thing to do is to investigate how the rads are connected to the cylinder and take it from there..

good luck :!:
 
FWIW I remember having the very same problem many years ago when we lived in a 3 storey house in Newcastle. In the end the plumber resorted to fitting an additional pump to the second floor circuit.
 
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