Balancing / Lock shield problem

[Achy]

I live in an "L" shaped bungalow.

The "_" bit of the house is open plan are tall (1.8 m) column type and the radiators take AGES (1.5 hours to get hot all over), when they do get hot, the room starts to get warm, but it does take about 2 hours to start.

The "|" bit of the house have trvs and they get nice and hot, nice and quickly....

But it seems to me that the the "_" bit doesnt seem to get enough flow until the "|" TRV radiators reach their temp and shut off.

(Still with me ? )

So I figured a balancing is in order.

The temp difference on some of them is only about 1 or 2 degrees, so I shut the lock shield down but they are only open about 1/4 turn as it is, any less than that and it seems to stop any flow at all !!!

I'm wondering if there is something (air lock?) stopping the water going down the "_" section and that it only gets the 'extra oomph' when the "|" bit is all shut off.

Anything I can do or look at ?

 

[gasacs]

dependant on the size of the bungalow it may need a more powerful pump to pump the water around the full circuit

 

[Steve__M]

I have a similar problem. Some of my valves are open only 1/8th turn as otherwise the large kitchen radiator doesn't get hot enough. With that, the pump is juuust strong enough to keep the system hot enough (14-15C drop across the radiators instead of 11-12C that is advised).

In my house the problem is that the kitchen radiator is big (1.5kW), but attached with small (10mm) pipes, and is a long way from the pump. Your radiators sound quite big as well.

I decided to accept the compromise of slightly cooler everywhere, but it took a long time to balance the system when a 1/8th turn makes the difference between a cold radiator and a hot one.

As an alternative to a bigger pump, you could consider checking how the pipe sizes match up to the radiator sizes and see what the practicality of upgrading the pipe size along some of its length is.

I calculated the power of my pump, the length of the pipes and the size of the radiators...but having done the maths once, the rule of thumb seemed to be that a long length of 10mm pipes may be too small for big radiators but 15mm are absolutely fine.