Downstairs moved out, now my boiler works again

Hi,

I moved into a the upper part of a two storey house in April this year. The previous owners installed a Baxi Platinum combi boiler a few years ago which was working fine until about 4 weeks ago. I started getting E133 errors on the boiler (the instruction flap on the boiler lists this as a 'Gas Supply Fault'). The error appeared several times a day, turning the dial to reset fixed it for a few hours at a time. Having a short shower was ok, but a bath full of hot water involved several resets. When it was having issues the hot water light took about 1 minute to come on and just before it would fail with E133 the light would turn on and off.

A couple of weeks ago my downstairs neighbour moved out and since then, no issues at all. I know the heating is off as I can see through a window that the thermostat reads ~12c (I'm in Scotland!).

My friendly Gas Safe engineer who sorted out some radiators for me earlier in the year was quite busy a few weeks ago so couldn't come out, then the urgency was reduced when it started working. I don't know when the new owners will move into the lower flat.

Could there be an issue with the boiler that is exacerbated by the increased use of the boiler downstairs when the weather got colder, or, could the boiler be fine and my first step would be to get the pressure of the gas supply checked? My gas meter was fitted in Dec 2017 and is a smart meter with an LCD and A and B buttons, can I get it to show me the pressure?

Thanks in advance,
Nick

 

You have one gas meter supplying two combi boilers? If so your issue might well be down to either gas pipe size, or trying to pull more gas through the meter than it is designed for. I suspect that with Winter approaching, your usage was coinciding more frequently with the usage of the boiler downstairs, and the gas system cannot cope with both running together

 

Hi Andrew, the property downstairs has a separate meter. There is a black box on the wall outside of the building just off the ground with a pipe coming up from the ground straight into it. The gas pipe that feeds my property comes up from the ground up to the first floor from a different location about 5 meters away on a different wall.

 

Have someone check the pressure

 

Thanks all. I chatted to SGN and an engineer has just been. He checked the pressure with a hot tap running, it was 20mb, which is in tolerance. Once the new owner has moved into the flat below, the engineer is going to call again with both of us running our boilers and take another pressure reading. From what I told him, he was pretty sure it's a gas pressure issue and not a problem with the boiler.