Hello,
I watched the plumber service my (oil fired) boiler and he did three things:
Now (1) and (2) can be done DIY but (3) requires flue gas meter. I'm wondering though at about £100 per service, if you could get a flue gas analyser for a couple of hundred pounds it might pay for itself within two or three years.
Is this something anyone has done? Are there any downsides? What analyser do you recommend and from where?
Thanks, Stephen.
Stephen coughed up some electrons that declared:
I can't recommend any from experience, except to say that "Kane" seems to appear in a lot of places.
Hopefully Ed, John or one of the other pros will be along soon with a proper recommendation...
One thing to watch for is that the sensors have limited life, including shelf life, if I'm correct.
I was planning to buy one off ebay for about 250 inc calibration cert, use it, then sell it back again at perhaps 50 quid loss, which makes for a reasonable hire charge in effect.
Hire, of course, is the other option, but the cheapest I could find was 100 quid per week.
Cheers
Tim
I bought a Kane250 about 6 years ago for servicing the various gas appliances around the family. It costs about £200 every two years to have the oxygen cell replaced and the unit calibrated, although so far I've done it on a 3 year cycle and put up without the measurements relying on the Oxygen cell during the third year. I believe if the Carbon Monoxide cell dies, the unit won't power on anymore, but so far, I haven't had the CO cell die between servicing. I am careful to purge it for a good while after use (leaving CO in it apparently shortens its life).
If you've just got one boiler to do, it's not going to be worth buying one. I wouldn't buy a second hand one either (unless it was fully checked and calibrated by Kane as part of the sale, but that alone is a significant part of the cost of a brand new one).
I don't know which analysers would be suitable for oil.
And if something was off you didnt know, you still would need a pro
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Stephen saying something like:
I use a Kane-May 700, bought as NOS a couple of years ago for $100 from ebay.us. It's fairly basic, providing only O2 and air measurements, but it does the job. Oxygen cells are expensive, at 40ukp a pop, and it does need calibrating from time to time. If I was only using it for one boiler, I wouldn't bother, I'd look at getting one of the old chemical-based Bacharach kits, which are cheaper to run as far as know.
On a different tack, out of curiousity what's the worst that can happen with a room-sealed boiler if the flue gases are all horrible and the thing is belching out carbon monoxide? Is it just a matter of efficiency?
You can get chemical rather than electronic analysers, I do now have one but have not used it much. The chemicals do deteriorate but are not so expensive to replace.
The flue gas analyser allows you to adjust the air, however once set, I am not so sure that it will vary that much
You can buy oil pressure guages to set the oil pressure, and thermocouples to check the flue temperature much more cheaply. You can also get something to check the smoke.
When servicing a boiler you should also check the ignition electrodes setting
Thanks everyone for your replies. I had not realised they needed constant replacing and recalibrating, so like you say, they are probably no use for a DIYer. As Michael said, hopefully once set up the flue gas rations should remain constant so perhaps I only have to pay a pro once to measure them and not worry about re-measuring every year?
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Stephen saying something like:
This is what you need, without going to great expense having to re-calibrate every two years and buy new O2 cells.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Anita Palley saying something like:
If it's properly room-sealed it shouldn't kill you, but I certainly wouldn't take the chance and get it seen to asap, for it could be leaking into the room. As you say, if it's belching out CO it's burning very badly and will be hellishly sooty inside and wasting fuel.
I have one of these which I bought new in the UK two years ago. The UK supplier has since changed. It uses a fluid which does deteriorate, and which, because of its corrosive? nature may well require a special carrier.
Do you buy and fit them yourself? So far, I've sent mine back to Kane, but that's very expensive.
In message , Andrew Gabriel writes
Generally an O2 cell is a piece of cake to fit providing you're not a gorilla. Might find them cheaper than £40, they're used in automotive analysers as well so if you have a friendly garage you may find they have a good supplier who can help you out.
If your friendly garage has a Bear/OTC/SPX gas analyser they may even let you have a sniff of the cal gas bottle so you can check your machine. The cal gas uses propane at around 2000PPM so if your analyser doesn't do propane you'll need to find the correction factor to check the calibration. The cal gas CO will be around 3.5% and CO2 will be around 15% with the balance made up of nitrogen, no oxygen at all.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@cucumber.demon.co.uk (Andrew Gabriel) saying something like:
When the first cell died I was reluctant to spend cash getting someone else to do what I could do perfectly well, so the analyser sat in its box and I used another one. I've since found that Citicel don't deal direct with end users, but sell to redistributors, one of which is Spantech:
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