Problems with our Worcester 24i

[kelly123]

Hello,
We've been having problems with our boiler for a while now... it makes a very annoying clicking sound coming from the thermo/timer area, it happens randomly, and sometimes goes on for a while. What it's also been doing is not heating the water if the heating's been on a while, ie, it's overheating. We turn it off, let it cool down and then the water runs hot again. It also sometimes fails to light and keeps trying to ignite.

What I realised was that if I pressed on the lower part, where the thermostate and timer are, it would light ok and there would be no clicking noises. We figured there was a connection loose somewhere so we put a small clamp on this area to keep it compressed and it worked fine. Now however, the timer has fallen apart, it was always a bugger to press those little bits to set the time and now the whole thing is loose.

We had a service recently, and the plumber said our gas supply to the boiler was a bit low. And now we figure we need a new thermostat and timer. Please let me know what you think, when the plumber was here for the service, he said because it's so random it would be difficult to fix, it could be this, could be that, and seemed to indicate that it would be a bit of trial and error, which sounds a bit costly to me.

As you can probably tell... I know nothing about boilers or plumbing so please make your response as non-techy as you can.

Thanks for your help

 

[ChrisR]

If you can make it not work, then it shouldn't be too hard to fault-find.
If you know something is faulty - sounds like you're saying the timer might be, then change it. Not hard - diy job.

Many boilers' gas supplies are undersized, it's only a problem if it's a bad case.
Yes, intermittent faults which don't reveal themselves to the engineer can be annoying.
Like a car which won't start. You look at the spark plugs, they look a bit old. You fit new ones, car starts. Next day it's up to its old tricks again - you don't get your money back for the spark plugs!