Search results

One of the reasons brass fittings have shot up in price is because the price of copper has risen very sharply over the last year. Demand for copper has increased a lot - EVs, wind turbines and expansion of the electricity grid has led to highly increased demand. In fact there is some doubt...

But to get to the base nuts, the OP will have to take the toilet completely off the wall. The only way I can think of avoiding that is to see if you can prise the part of the mounting on top of the toilet far enough away from the toilet to get a saw or multi tool in to cut it off. The base nuts...

An alternative is to use a pipe freezing kit just upstream from the valve you want to change. You do of course need to drain the radiator first.

Yes you may get a coating of what looks like corrosion on brass or chromed brass. However, there is a phenomenum called "de-zincification" which certain water supplies have caused on brass fittings containing more than about 15% zinc, where the zinc preferentially leaches out of the brass...

Maybe grout is not the best sealant - you could use white silicone instead

At the risk of being pedantic, your flush is not via a siphon but instead is by the bellows operated flush valve, which is effectively just a flap at the bottom of the cistern which opens to flush and closes again to allow the cistern to refill.

It's good he is coming back to sort this out. As for "give it time to settle", that's akin to salespeople in clothes shops when you try on something that's obviously too big saying "it'll ride up with wear sir"!

I assume the batteries you replaced were in the thermostat-transmitter. This has a small icon in its display when it's calling for heat, and when this is on, the green pilot light on the receiver should be on also. If the icon on the transmitter isn't on, then it's a problem with that. If the...

Do you really need to remove the radiator to decorate? Is there enough room behind the radiator to use a suitably cranked small brush to paint the wall behind it (at least the visible part) It seems an awful lot of trouble to remove the radiator and you may well get leaks from the joints when...

The main part of the radiator appears to have just surface rust, but the bit where the valve tail screws in does look quite serious. I would be concerned about this leaking - it'll probably only be a weep at first, but I would get the towel rad changed reasonably soon. If you want to avoid...

Beware that the bio fuel replacement for ordinary domestic heating oil has given some people trouble with growth of bugs in it, causing sludge and blockages. Considering that Britain as a whole contributes less than 1% to global carbon dioxide emissions, even if all users of heating oil...

The one at the top probably (the bleed screw unit) needs a new rubber O-ring. Again, turn off both valves feeding the towel rail, drain enough water out to get it below the top leak, then unscrew the unit, put on a new O-ring and screw it back in.

Even if it's a small leak, it's worth trying to find it and repairing it. Even a small leak will require new water to be continually added to the CH circuit, introducing new oxygen and diluting the inhibitor. So corrosion within the system will be increased.

This seems to be a downside of combi boilers that heat domestic HW solely on demand. I think this means (though I guess you could design a boiler with 2 separate heat exchangers) that there can't be total separation of the DHW and CH water circuits and, instead, a valve has to be used to direct...

I suspect the old valve had its fill tube dipped below the water surface in the tank. This is now not permitted because of the risk of backflow, so the new valve will just drop water from the valve onto the surface of the water and that's the noise you can hear.

Yup...in my opinion combi boilers that only heat water as you call for it have serious drawbacks which are often not made clear by boiler fitters who present them as the "modern" replacement for systems with HW cylinders. It's true of course that a HW cylinder continuously loses some heat which...

You can also get an Oil Lifter which is a suction pump and header tank combined which can be fixed above the boiler to provide a gravity feed, and which is able to draw oil from an oil tank which is below the boiler and even a significant distance from it horizontally. Just google "oil lifter"...

If the HW temperature is set to 60C try raising it to 70C to see if this makes the HW more acceptable to you. 60c is the generally accepted minimum temp to kill legionnaires disease bacteria, so I guess that's why your installer set it at that. You may find 70C too hot and at risk of scalding...

People converting to heat pumps from gas or oil boilers have been paying up to £20k if they need new radiators and piping. These are often necessary because the flow temperature from a heat pump is much lower than that from a gas or oil boiler, so the radiators need to be bigger to give out heat...

Whatever the merits and de-merits of heat pumps, don't expect that changing to one from you boiler will improve your EPC rating. Because EPCs are currently based mainly on cost of the energy supply to a house, using a heat source that relies on electricity is seen by the EPC system as a bad...