IDEAL HE30 COMBI WATER IN GAS MAINS

[stilts32]

Hi everyone this is my first post here and was hoping someone might be able to help me.

I have an Ideal isar he30 combi boiler which is no longer working. The boiler is 7 years old and up until December 2011 we had no problems with it, which im aware is a rarity. Last December the boiler would intermittently display fault code FL and we would lose the heating and hot water, once it had been reset it would usually come back on. At the same time my gas rings on my cooker seemed to be going out every now and then. At the time i just presumed that it was my bad luck that both my boiler and cooker were packing up at the same time.

In February of this year the boiler stopped working completely and pressing the reset button had no effect. 2 days later my cooker also stopped working. I rung British Gas to see if there was possibly a problem with the gas supply and they sent someone out to look at the gas supply. It was discovered that we gas a large amount of water in the mains gas pipe. We had this drained and both the boiler and cooker started working although only temporarily. We had a Nat Grid engineer out to drain the gas mains a further 3 times over the next 3 says before they decided the mains pipe needed replacing due to a leak in it, presumably this was how the gas was getting out and the water getting in. After the work was finished the boiler and cooker would still play up so i called a plumber out thinking it was just a boiler issue after all.

The plumber said water had entered my boiler via the gas mains, and the same with the gas cooker rings and had damaged the heat exchange. He charged me £200 to take the heat exchange out and pour some pink liquid in it to clean it. He said he was clearing the dirt out of it that had come in through the gas pipe. The boiler then worked fine for just over a month until it started displaying the FL code again. The same plumber came out and said the heat exchange was damaged beyond repair and that the gas valve had also gone due to being corroded by the water in the boiler.

I have an ongoing complaint with Nat Grid regarding the damage to the boiler and have been told that after 5 months with no heating and hot water, that they will compensate me for either the cost of repairing the boiler or a new boiler depending on whether the boiler is economically viable to be repaired, providing my plumber will categorically state the damage to the boiler has been caused by the water in the gas mains. The plumber says he believes this is the case but because he can not be 100% sure he wont put it in writing, he states that even though he knows no one has purposely damaged the boiler there is a very remote possibility that i have taken my boiler apart and filled it with water????? therefore causing the damage.

What i wanted to know on here is, firstly is it possible for water in the gas mains to enter my boiler, secondly if it was to enter the boiler what parts of the boiler are likely to be damaged and thirdly how do i prove this.

Sorry for the long post but thought id put everything relevant to help describe the problem and thank you in advance for any helpful replies.

 

[Agile]

Where did NG dig up the supply pipe to repair it?

What level is the boiler at in the house?

We do sometimes see water in gas pipes.

This rarely causes serious damage to a boiler and when there is its normally corrosion inside the gas valve.

I dont see how a heat exchanger can be involved.

Tony

 

[McCombi]

Agree with Agile above.
If you meant he removed the heat engine to clean the inside of the heatengine then in my opinion this is unrelated to water in the gas pipe.
If there was water in a gas pipe on these boilers it can go through the gasvalve, the fan then sucks the gas through to the burner which fires downwards onto the heat engine which is filled with water which heats up and gets pumped around your system (radiators).
All these components are gas related so please dont attempt to have a look yourself.
Good chance it is an unrelated fault, these are problematic boilers, If you get another rgi to have a look, try to find one with experience in isars, they will know all the usual things to look at, but you wont get answers on here for your own safety.

 

[stilts32]

Thank you for the replies. Im not looking for answers in an attempt to fix the problem myself. We are getting a new boiler installed regardless of what i manage to find out regarding the old boiler.

I was just trying to establish if the boiler fault was caused by Nat Grid or whether it was merely a coincidence. My plumber was positive the damage was caused by water in the gas pipes but after what you have both said on here im not sure he is right.

Obviously i dont want to keep chasing this complaint with Nat Grid if at the end of the day it was just a coincidence.

Just found the receipt for the work the plumber did back in Feb and it reads 'cleaned out plate heat exchange, fitted new divertor valve motor head' or at least that what it looks like he has written, once again is this a typical example of a problem caused by water in the mains or just my boiler slowing packing up one bit at a time.

Thank you.

 

[stilts32]

In reply to Agile the boiler is on the ground floor situated in the kitchen on the wall, the gas meter is directly underneath the boiler on an external wall outside the house.

As far as i am aware Nat Grid replaced the pipe from the front of my property right through to the gas meter, all i know is that it was a yellow pipe and i had the full length of the garden dug up. They were here for 5 days. They also told me that at some point some other pipe work had been altered as when they took the old pipe up they discovered that there was a smaller pipe threaded right through the pipe. Dont know what this means but im presuming you will.

 

[McCombi]

Cleaning out the plate heat exchanger and the diverter valve is unrelated to water in the gas pipe in mt eyes, as is the diverter valve Im afraid to say. These problems are related to the water quality in the system. Probably due to sludge or maybe scale which we don't get in the water up here so have never had to deal with it.

 

[algas]

Water in the gas pipe can enter the gas valve & possibly be sucked up into the fan, these are the only components that could be damaged in this way, the plate ht ex & the diverter valve are totaly different pieces of equipment, so the gas supply company would not be liable for anything to do with them.

 

[shambolic]

Water damage could occur in the gas valve due to leaking main heat exchanger as water could (and will) travel down the impulse tube into the gas valve from combustion chamber. This will cause an LF fault.
Low gas pressure at meter will also cause an LF fault.
Sounds like you have actually had 2 problems unrelated though.
Low gas pressure in mains causing cooker faults and mibbee some LF faults.
And leaking heat exchanger causing water ingress into gas valve also causing LF faults.
If main hex and gas valve are done, then better off replacing boiler in the long run.