A friend is living abroad, and rents out his UK house. His tenant has reported that the bath hot tap has intermittent flow - it runs OK for a while, then pauses "to catch its breath" and then resumes again.
He's asked me to look at it, and either fix it or diagnose the problem for a plumber to fix (a plumber has already looked at it and has no idea, and wants money to look again - not very confidence-inspiring!). Unfortunately it's over a hundred miles from here, so I haven't seen it yet, and want to get as much information as I can beforehand because I'll have limited time while I'm there.
I've been told:
"It's always done this a bit, but it's got worse".
Flow rate between pauses is good.
There is a cold tank in the loft, and a hot water cylinder on the 1st floor, same level as the bathroom.
The hot pipe to the bathroom goes up into the loft and down again (sounds great for creating airlocks!).
The water is heated by a back-boiler behind the living room fire (ground floor).
The basin hot-tap's and all cold taps' flow is OK and don't have this problem.
The water is Hard!
So it sounds like a direct, vented system (I'll confirm when I visit).
My thoughts on possibilities are:
- air is accumulating in the "up an over" pipe to the bathroom
- there is a restriction in the cold feed into the hot cylinder
- air is being drawn down the vent/overflow pipe
Anyone seen this sort of thing before, and/or have any suggestions as to the cause, and what to look at/do to diagnose it?
I have experience of installing plumbing (I re-plumbed my own house from the stopcock upwards a number of years ago) but none of debugging problems (my installation didn't have any!
Cheers,
Howard
He's asked me to look at it, and either fix it or diagnose the problem for a plumber to fix (a plumber has already looked at it and has no idea, and wants money to look again - not very confidence-inspiring!). Unfortunately it's over a hundred miles from here, so I haven't seen it yet, and want to get as much information as I can beforehand because I'll have limited time while I'm there.
I've been told:
"It's always done this a bit, but it's got worse".
Flow rate between pauses is good.
There is a cold tank in the loft, and a hot water cylinder on the 1st floor, same level as the bathroom.
The hot pipe to the bathroom goes up into the loft and down again (sounds great for creating airlocks!).
The water is heated by a back-boiler behind the living room fire (ground floor).
The basin hot-tap's and all cold taps' flow is OK and don't have this problem.
The water is Hard!
So it sounds like a direct, vented system (I'll confirm when I visit).
My thoughts on possibilities are:
- air is accumulating in the "up an over" pipe to the bathroom
- there is a restriction in the cold feed into the hot cylinder
- air is being drawn down the vent/overflow pipe
Anyone seen this sort of thing before, and/or have any suggestions as to the cause, and what to look at/do to diagnose it?
I have experience of installing plumbing (I re-plumbed my own house from the stopcock upwards a number of years ago) but none of debugging problems (my installation didn't have any!
Cheers,
Howard
