Dirty hot water mystery

not be a loss of pressure in normal use.

sounds plausible.

The CH would lose pressure after the tank was drained, but it could be a slow leak. It should be covered by the maker's guarantee, if the OP has the receipts, so it would be a cheap fix, compared to most faults.

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Onetap
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sounds plausible.

It doesn't. The HW tank is only 3 years old.

Tim

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Tim+

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Nope. It's a sealed CH system. No pressure loss

Tim

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Tim+

mmm but the HW tank is mains pressure? & the CH is pressurised by the mains= through the filling loop(when being re-pressuised)?

So spose the CH should be at a lower pressure than full-on mains? If you we= re to reduce slightly the pressure in the CH would it magically gain pressu= re (overnight say) from a possible leak in the HW tank coil between the mai= ns pressure HW cylinder and CH system?

That wouldn't explain how the crud comes back out of the CH system into the= HW tank to give mucky water - but would confirm no leaks in the HW tank co= il?

Jim K

Reply to
Jim K

Well, I finally got around to disconnecting the pipework from the top of the tank the other day and tried syphoning the water out with a hosepipe to see if I could drain the mud from the bottom of the tank.

This didn't porduce the expected results so I assume that the hose was coiling up in the tank. I found a bit of 15mm plastic pipe which made a perfect "dip-tube" to reach to the bottom of the tank and started syphoning again.

Again, there was hardly any discolouration.

Having drained of a good deal of water reassmbled everything and repressurised the system, I just flushed all the hot taps for at least half an hour each.

This produced some crud briefly but then the water ran clear.

Despite all this, I'm *still* getting some discolouration when first openning a tap in the morning (shower and bathroom sink) . It's probably a bit less marked than it was though. I think just *has* to be silt in the pipework but it's proving very hard (and slow) to shift completely. :-(

I guess in time it will just clear up and I suspect it's the higher flow rates induced by having a mains pressure tank now that is shifting all this old crud but I'm amazed at how persistent the ruddy stuff is! The tank was installed over a year ago and the problem has been going on all this time.

Tim

Tim+ wrote:

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As you can see, only very lightly stained.

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Tim+

Is it enough to be filtered in some way so you could just change the filter every so often.

Brian

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Brian Gaff

We've been scratching our heads over this for months and having ruled out sludge in the tank and contaminated mains, I had decided that it had to be rotting stainless pipework. (There's a lot of it about in houses in our area).

Anyhow, I was resigning myself to lifting floors, changing pipes etc. when I thought I'd have a last look at the pipework in the loft and it was only then that I realised that we had a very large dead leg of SS pipework in the loft (and leading back to the tank). This had been rendered mostly redundant a few years back and other changes to the plumbing at another time had rendered it totally redundant. Because the work was done at different times by different people, I don't think anyone had realised that this leg was now dead.

Anyhow, it's now removed and problem solved (I think). ;-)

Tim

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Tim+

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