Towel rail issues

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About a year ago we had our bathroom redone and a towel rail put in instead of the existing radiator. It's now behaving quite erratically (and has done so for a while) sometimes heating up fine and other times not.

It may or may not be related to an issue we are having with our boiler overheating - this only happens when the hot water is on, with the CH it is fine. When I had a fiddle earlier this week I got things working eventually on the advice of Google by holding a magnet to the feed pipe of the towel rail, there was a little gurgle and TR heated up (this was with just HW on). We have a magnaclean fitted but this hadn't been cleaned out for at least 18 months (when I inherited this crazy house) until around 4 weeks ago. Loads of sludge around the magnet but checked again yesterday and has not built up too badly since.

Anyway, everything worked beautifully and I was patting myself on the back ... until today when the boiler tripped with an overheating error again. Towel rail was stone cold despite the rest of the rads being burning hot. I'm guessing, and only guessing here, that it was working fine up until then because the TR is a bypass for the boiler?

I've tried turning all other rads off, no effect (except to potentially slightly increase pressure when bleeding) so I'm guessing this is not a balancing issue?

Bleeding gets water - I tried to work out whether a valve was stuck closed by bleeding with one open and one closed but interestingly with both what I think is closed I still get water. I'm wondering if that's because I'm an idiot and misunderstanding the valves - they both look like Altech brand straight manual. On the feed the top circular cap unscrews completely and the cylindrical body seems to turn the valve. On the return the top circular cap won't unscrew and appears to turn the valve whereas the cylindrical body is just a loose cover and spins indefinitely either way. I'd be grateful if someone could tell me if I'm adjusting them in the right way or not - used to ordinary rad valves! The deed valve with the cap unscrewed looks like this:

4ryh6r.jpg


Interestingly when the CH kicked in just now the feed pipe to the TR immediately got hot, then after about ten seconds (which sounded like when the boiler fired up) it ran stone cold. Any ideas what would cause that?

I should probably also mention our pipe system from the boiler is apparently also crazy as the pump is on the wrong pipe (according to the several plumbers weve had out over the last year). It's run fine though up until now and all the plumbers have agreed it works, it is just crazy! I've taken a photo in case that helps ...
r74u54.jpg


Any help / advice would be gratefully appreciated! I'm going to have a plumber out again to look at it but my usual one won't be able to get to us until after Christmas and everyone else seems almost as busy! I've turned the hot water off and using the immersion heater again so that the boiler doesn't continue to overheat, so don't think there is a safety issue (it's worked fine with HW off for the last 2 months). The plumber that came out when the overheating issue initially occurred said it wasn't the pump - he thought most likely it was the automatic bypass valve but he wanted to repipe the whole system. He's been too busy since to do it, but he never looked at the TR as at that point I hadn't really realised it wasn't working since the heating was down low anyway.
 
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