HELP My boiler won' t fire up

[andyG]

The pilot light on my gas fired boiler went out I re lit it but now when I turn the stat on the boiler up I can't get the thing to fire up. I have turned the room stat right up and the pump works OK and when the pump is on there is a power light on at the spur The programmer is set to constant The pilot light stays on OK. One thing all this seemed to happen after I managed to drill thro the main 30 amp feed to the electric cooker whilst installing a new cooker hood ..... oops nice one ! Don't know whether or not this had anything to do with it ? Same circuit etc. Fixed that tho + replaced fuse wire etc.

Pretty desperate now to get some heat urgently so any help would be most appreciated

Cheers

[Andy Hall]

Mentioning the make and model of the boiler wouldn't hurt... :-)

How is the boiler connected to the cooker circuit? Normally the cooker should be on a dedicated circuit with perhaps a 13A outlet at the switch panel. You shouldn't have a spur from that to a boiler outlet......

Probably not the immediate cause of your problems but this should be corrected if wired in that way.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[andyG]

Sorry its an old Glow Worm ( Space Saver ) but still 'glowing' strong ! I guess that it was just a coincidence that the boiler went down at the same time as I blew the cooker fuse out. ( Too traumatic for the old boy ) I did think that the cooker should be on a dedicated circuit and this appears to be so. I've never had a free standing cooker here - just wired the seperate oven (gas hob ) to switch panel. Surprised / shocked me that cable was just under plaster with a thin strip of plastic over ... no real protective sheathing ( metal ) I guess regs. are different now ?

Anyway good news I managed to get it to fire up. Don't really know what I did but could be some sort of safety button on boiler stat . I took knob off an pushed in ....... The previous owner did not leave a manual or anything so its been hit

• miss etc. I must try and get hold of some documentation to see how everything works - hate not knowing.

Cheers

[stefek.zaba]

No: regs continue to assume a degree of sense on the part of the drill holder ;-) It continues to be OK to run cables simply buried in the plaster,

*provided* they're in a direct horiozontal or vertical line from a visible fitting; or in a couple of well-defined narrow strips - horizontal within 6inches of the wall-ceiling corner, and 6ins either side of the corners of the room. Other routes require the cable to be either more than 2 inches deep from the surface of the wall, or to have extra protection against nailing/drilling. (The idea is to protect against "foreseeable" wall penetration - picture pins and drill-holes for normal-size wallplugs. The belief is that heftier works will be undertaken with due care...)

Many people find that even the cheap cable detectors work quite well, especially when there's current flowing in the cable. (Detecting wooden studs reliably isn't as well done by cheap scanners; but metal, expecially with dancing electrons, is easier.)

HTH, Stefek

[andyG]

Yep I really must invest in cable detector .... they used to be a luxury item in the old days . Don't have much need for one but for those odd occasions etc. Sods law that the one mounting screw hole just had to be right in the path of the cable ....... no excuse + just as well drills are made of plastic these days ! Been spoilt living/working in Portugal for 13 years . Built a new house there - sank tough plastic trunking into hollow bricks & covered with good 1/2 '' cement render, One other thing why is the cable to my new stainless steel cooker hood only 2 core ..... no earth ??

[stefek.zaba]

If this cable is what the manufacturer has fitted, then we presume the cooker hood has been built not to need an earth - wot was previously called "double insulated" and is now called "Class II". There should be a little symbol somewhere on the cooker hood (probably on the rating plate which says how many watts it eats) showing one square inside another.

But if the cable's been replaced or extended by some random bodge merchant, you'll be wanting to undo said bodge...

HTH, Stefek