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You probably have an unvented cylinder with expansion vessel. It is possible you have a leak in the expansion vessel diaphragm, allowing the water to reach the steel surface and pick up rust with its colour. That happened to us and the bath water looked very yellow/brown (before I even got...

I was curious to know if the rust implies a serious fault. There is no way I would "tinker" with the boiler beyond checking this trap - which was shown to me by a Vaillant repair chap.....

Hello, today I cleaned the condensate trap of our EcoTec Plus 618 which is 11 years old. The plastic is discoloured orange and there was about 4mm of black rust granules at the bottom of it. Does this mean the burner chamber (or whatever it is called) is rusting? Does it indicate I need to...

Hello. Unless I'm mistaken, you can adjust the flow to each circuit using the square brass bit with the pin sticking, through visible in your photo under the thermo head. Because there are no flow indicators, it's impossible to know how to balance the flows, however .........

If it's a smart controller, it will decide when to come on in order to achieve the required temperature at the set time. The instruction manual says, "3.4 Intelligent function: The thermostat has a self thinking and adaptive system. This function enables the thermostat to calculate when it...

I agree totally with MJN's comments above. We have a Vent Axia Sentinel Kinetic in our house built 10 years ago. (I'm not a salesman for Vent Axia and know of other, possibly better, machines!) People worry about the electricity consumed by the HRV unit, so I put a meter on it for a year and...

Let's imagine you get in the habit of covering and removing the insulation as you say. One day something will cause you to forget. A breakdown on a journey, an emergency at friends or relatives - even going away on holiday and the excitement of the departure. If there is a possibility of...

Hello again, aaaargh! When we had our house built 10 years ago, the plumber was asked to order EK303 for the shower room and EK304 for the en-suite. I just checked and your new one looks like our other one. It appears he installed them the wrong way round. (It's unlikely he bought altogether...

Hello, I think this is similar to our sink waste: https://www.victorianplumbing.co.uk/sprung-basin-waste?campaign=googlebase&gclid=CjwKCAjw7rWKBhAtEiwAJ3CWLMumv46VWXJqSjrkMwz95UlIYDQlyGgjJIUJeDTCyz5iYlrZ3oPJYxoCXO0QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds It's an EK303 by Hudson Reed. As you can see in the...

Our house was built 10 years ago. Relatively airtight, it does not have trickle vents in the windows. Our neighbours installed a very smelly woodburner and local farmers sometimes spread smelly things around. Officially, we cannot stop these smells being sucked into the house by switching the...

These can be very annoying at night - at 3.31am........... Many of these have some kind of controller which allows you to change the running speed; some even have a built in clock. The controller might be wall mounted or on the front of the HRV unit itself. Ours is a Vent-Axia unit and we...

Some of the SMD ICs used these days have 12 soldered connections along each of 4 sides only 9mm (3/8”) long. Once upon a time, the friendly TV repair man would study a PCB and, indeed, resolder a dry joint or remove and replace a dead capacitor. Nowadays, though, his job would be very difficult...

I arranged for Vaillant's fixed price repair. Yes, it's not cheap at £285 but that's the first repair in 9 years and a PCB alone is the best part of £180. The chappie diagnosed within seconds exactly what you'd said - dry joint on PCB and promptly replaced it. I was very impressed with him -...

Thanks for your replies. Luckily it hasn't stopped yet.....maybe tomorrow!

Many thanks, Ian. I'll look into that. Roddy

As a born miser, I suppose I just hope everything will run happily forever without maintenance. But it is 9 years old so that's not too bad. Thanks for your help though.

Oh dear...... time to get the bank account in order!

My Vaillant ecoTEC plus 618 display is always illuminated - previously it would go dark until I turned one of the temperature setting knobs. Not only that but now the temperature shown is flickering irregularly around the preset temperature (70°) and also flashing back to the outgoing...