Is this legal or not? Good idea or not?
Proposal is to lead a pipe out of roofspace where boiler will be located and into roof gutter. Alternative is to pipe it into downpipe - but less attractive cosmetically.
No problem at all. The CORGI guy who installed our combi in the loft did this and the CORGI/Gas Safe guys who've done the annual service have no problem with it either.
Issue is likely to be it freezing during a cold spell, particularly the water in the gutter (which being horizontally exposed to clear sky in winter, is very likely to freeze), and is also going to get blocked with snow when you've got 6" on your roof and gutters.
I recall someone mentioning on here years ago when a 4' icicle broke free from their condensate drain, and came smashing through the conservatory roof.
Are their not any wash basins upstairs (or other things with runaways) upstairs with internal drains which you could couple to from the loft?
I have to plumb in a condensate drain and PRV piping in a couple of weeks' time for my new boiler, which I am putting in the loft.
I was planning to plumb the condensate drain straight into a uPVC soil stack via a new boss. For the PRV, I was going to do the classic 15mm pipe through the wall turned back in on itself.
Both of these methods my involve taking a short bit of piping down through the bathroom ceiling (from the loft) then outside through the house wall. I assume there is no problem with having the PRV pipe vent so high up, as long as there are no doorways below?
No problem with this is there?
Otherwise, surely loads of tower blocks all with PRVs high up on the wall would be against regs. Running a 15mm all the way down the house would be ugly enough for me to rethink siting the boiler in the loft!
Luke
Good advice Andrew and certainly something for the OP to think about. However, all I can say is that we've just had the coldest and most prolonged snow/ice christmas/new year for about 30 years and we suffered no such problems. Plenty snow and ice on the roof but the condensate drained away as it should.
Again, like my reply to the OP, no problem with the PRV through the wall and turned back on itself, or with the condensate drain through the roof and into the gutter.
Lots of people had condensing boilers fail last winter, for the reason of condensate drains freezing. In many cases, this was due to installers not following the instructions (e.g. using 22mm pipework outside), but in some cases it happened in spite of following instructions, and the industry has been reviewing the rules for condensate drains as a consequence of this.
I even removed an iceplug from a fall pipe that had nearly frozen solid (44mm?).
One of my jobs this summer is to move a neighbours condensate from the gutter, re-run it internally and plumb it into the bath waste. It was not much fun in the snow trying to melt the condensate pipe in the gutter. Almost certainly the biggest problem was caused by the snow in the gutter restricting the condensate pipe. I took a lot of phonecalls from people over the cold spell with "broken" boilers. They were all frozen condensates.
Cheers
Adam
I will see what happens this winter. I did consider options inside the house and they were all messy to run. The other option was to tee it into the rainwater downpipe.
ARWadsworth :
I've no experience of any of this but ISTM that you might be able to prevent freeze-ups by installing a fat pipe projecting only an inch or so outside the wall; and then position a funnel underneath to collect the water and route it to a drain. Is there any reason why not?
What is wrong with a condensate reservoir & pump actuated by a simple float? Thereby it pumps out a "bulk" of water which will be warm house temperature every so often.
Not in the loft it won't. Indeed, it probably represents yet another potential point of failure, one such failure mode being that it freezes.
Shouldn't there be a frost stat in the loft to prevent just that? Perhaps one very good reason why you shouldn't have a boiler in an unheated area.
Most have an arrangement that does that based on a syphon. It mitigates the effect but fails in a long cold spell such as the past winter. Each 'flush' builds up a film of ice until the pipe is blocked.
replying to John, Chris Hammond wrote: You cannot discharge condense into gutters because it is a acidic
You cannot discharge condense into gutters because it is acidic and birds drink from gutters.gas safe inspector told me this on an inspection.
It's not *very* acidic though, and presumably the taste is as obvious to birds as it would be to you.
At the previous house we had, the boilers were in a cupboard on the first floor. About a dozen years ago, one winter my neighbour's heating failed. He said the boiler would start working, but after a few minutes would stop. I told him why - I could see the installer had put the outlet of the condensate pipe right down at the bottom of the gutter above the garage. After a heavy frost, the water in the gutter froze, so the condensate had nowhere to go. It was solved by cutting a few cm off the end of the pipe so it remained above the water level.
Birds can't taste capsaicin (chilli), so that's not a safe presumption. If you don't want squirrels pinching the bird food, sprinkle it with chilli powder.
Jeff Layman snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid wrote in news:r4v8ke$rjg$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
I had that problem - I arranged a tee and an upward bend on the pipe that runs down into a tub in the airing cupboard. In the event of a freeze the water runs into the bucket - it has only happened twice.
Perhaps the installer naively assumed that a properly fitted gutter would never have standing water in it.
My mate has something similar, the pipe goes across the garage roof and into a gutter, just above the downpipe. When it freezes, a plug of ice slides out until it hits the side of the gutter, at which point it all freezes up. Not this winter though!
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