Changing bath taps?

[Gareth]

Can someone help.

I need to try to change leaking/old bath taps.

The boiler system is conventional - hot water tank and cold tank in the attic.

I understand that I need to turn the cold water tank off using the tap attached to the tank. That sounds quite easy for the cold tap.

There's oddly no isolator tap however between the hot water cylinder and the bath tap. I have never seen this before - there are no isolator taps at all attached to the cylinder. Does this mean then that I have to completely drain the hot water tank first? Sounds like an obvious question but it does seem odd that there would be no way of isolating the tank.

[John Rumm]

Get some rubber plugs (or if stuck a couple of decent sized carrots!), and shove one in the *outlet* of the cold tank (i.e. reach into the water from the inside and stuff the exit pipe), and another in the vent pipe that should be hanging over it it from the HW cylinder. Run off some water from the system, and you should find that stops both hot and cold flow to the bath without draining anything down.

If you need to drain the pipes completely (say to solder etc) then open the bath taps and turn on some other taps lower in the system. That should let the pipes empty.

While you are at it, stick a couple of service valves under the bath so next time its easy ;-)

[The Medway Handyman]

The convention is for the cold tap in the bath to be fed from the loft tank. Turn off the valve on the pipe going out or turn off the off the supply to the tank & drain it.

It might be however that your bath cold tap is mains fed, in which case turn off the main stopcock.

There should be a valve on the inlet to the tank - note that the inlet is at the bottom, the outlet is at the top.

What happens is that water from the cold tank in the loft enters the hot water cylinder at the bottom & forces water out from the top.

If no valves on the cylinder inlet, drain the cold tank in the loft.