Replace radiator was hot for 1 month now cold

[Agile]

Just swap the wheel head with the LS cover; they have been put on the wrong way round! Radiators are bidirectional.

It makes absolutely no difference to the system or the user whether the lockshield is on the flow or the return.

Unless for psycological reasone someone falsely things one is better or worse.

Thermostatic valves however are a different matter. They have been designed wrongly from the outset to be placed on the flow and then modified to work fairly well on the return.

If you started at the design stage now, you would put the TRV on the return where its head was operating at a lower temperature and so better able to respond to the room temperature.

Tony

 

[Agile]

It is possible to inject X800 into a rad !

BUT you really need access to the header tank to clean that out and then to turn off the supply to the ball valve while you drain the system.

Of course you CAN turn off the water supply to the whole house instead but thats inconvenient and does not clean out the header tank.

There is the further aspect of checking/setting the water level in the header. It thats wrong it can be causing problems which create sludge.

Just because you have a sludge blockage in one rad does not mean thats the only blockage. Sludge blocks all the pipes to a greater or lesser degree. Just as the one rad got blocked over one month the same can happen to the others if you dont properly clean the whole system.

Tony

 

[WabbitPoo]

Its a combi boiler - why is there a header tank in the loft? Mine was removed when I changed to a combi

 

[Agile]

@WabbitPoo It is a combi boiler Glow.worm Micron 50FF with a hot water tank underneath. As I said it is always this 1 rad that had been the problem over the last 2 years but in the 5 previous years it was fine so I'm hoping it is a sludge problem, rather than a boiler problem.

Poo, I know that she said that its a combi boiler but if you are giving advice you should know that boiler is NOT a combi!

In any case she goes on to say there is a hot water tank which is typical of a NON-combi.

Tony

 

[ElizabethR]

@WabbitPoo Apologies if that isn't a combi boiler. To be honest not sure but that model I typed is what is on the instructions. As you can tell I'm not a plumber or ch expert and came to the house already filled with the system, so until things aren't working don't tend to take much notice of what we have. As I said never been in the loft but there is definately a tank up there on some kind of structure but not sure if it feeds the ch or just the hot water tank.

@Tony Thanks for your post about the x800. Although you say turning of the water supply would be inconvenient it would certainly be safer to do that, although I see your point about the sludge could be in the tank and then be fed back through the system when we refill it. Is it common for a sludge blocked rad to still let a supply of cold water past or would you summise that the blockage is quite far away from the rad in question and when we are bleeding this rad it is drawing the water that has been held in said pipe and not pulling through the hot water due to the blockage?

 

[WabbitPoo]

@WabbitPoo It is a combi boiler Glow.worm Micron 50FF with a hot water tank underneath. As I said it is always this 1 rad that had been the problem over the last 2 years but in the 5 previous years it was fine so I'm hoping it is a sludge problem, rather than a boiler problem.

Poo, I know that she said that its a combi boiler but if you are giving advice you should know that boiler is NOT a combi!

In any case she goes on to say there is a hot water tank which is typical of a NON-combi.

Tony

I wasn't giving advice. I was trying to clear up the confusion of the OP thinking it was a combi boiler when it also had a header tank. Numpt.

 

[joe-90]

Don't you go around upsetting my mate Tony.

 

[ElizabethR]

@WabbitPoo & Tony. Many thanks for the information, Just to keep you posted, we changed the valves on all but 2 of our Rads this weekend although we had to turn off the water for all of Saturday due to there only being 1 tank visible in the loft and we couldn't get to that without laying out boards. All seems fine now apart from 1 rad that is leaking due to the new olive becoming bent out of shape when we screwed the valve on. This is now oliveless and being held with PTFE. Next weekend that rad will have to have the valve refitted but we have isolated that one so hopefully I wont go downstairs in the morning to find a swimming pool in my dining room. The only thing I would like to say is that nowhere did I read about the hexagonal Ratchet thingy that you use to get the valve out of the rad. We didn't know about this which is why we changed the rad in November as we couldn't get all of the valve off. Luckily my other half spotted the ratchet thingy in the plumbing section of B&Q and this weekend when we came to do the first rad and still couldn't get the valve off it he remembered he had seen something that could work. £30 later and that saved us a small fortune as I was about to buy yet another new Rad. Our other purchases were a junior hacksaw to cut through the old olives and PTFE tape. One problem we had was that the previous installer had put 15mm valves on the wheelhead side which had been attached to the 8mm pipe with plumbers compound into a 15mm pipe coupling and then the 15mm valve on top.Tried the CH and the bedroom was super toastie so many many thanks.

 

[WabbitPoo]

good news. I too hope you dont find a watery mess in the morning.