How to stop the boiler piddling?

[Colin Stamp]

Hi all,

I fitted a condensing boiler a few months ago, not in the same place as the original floor-stander. Since then It's been working with a temporary condensate drain running into the top of an unfinished soil stack. Not particularly ideal, but it worked without any issues - not even smells!

Now though I've got round to re-doing it "properly", which consisted of installing an appliance standpipe directly underneath the boiler drain. This has the side effect that the boiler now makes a piddling noise which can be heard in the room above.

It probably won't be an issue once the whole lot is in a cupboard, but I just wondered if there was an easy way to silence it. Any ideas?

Cheers,

Colin.

[Dave Liquorice]

Presumably the stand pipe has a trap and you can hear the condensate dropping from the boiler drain into the water in the trap? If so just arrange for the condensate to flow down the side of the stand pipe. Maybe cut the end of the drain pipe at an angle and place the point against the side of the standpipe.

[Chris Hogg]

Failing that, tie one end of a bit of thick string around the boiler drain pipe and push the other end into the top of the stand pipe, and arrange it so that the condensate dribbles down the string.

[Colin Stamp]

I think I'll try getting the water to run down the side first. I think what's making it worse is that it's already fallen the best part of a metre inside the boiler drain pipe, so it's going quite fast when it exits.

The current plan is to glue an elbow onto the end of the boiler pipe, facing the wall of the standpipe, and then cut it off flush. Then the water should only fall a few cm before hitting the water in the trap.

Hopefully, piddling in the drain pipe should be more muffled than piddling at the bottom of the standpipe...

Cheers,

Colin.

[Dave Liquorice]

That doesn't help but sort of surprised that the condensate isn't on the side of the boiler drain pipe as it leaves the boiler. If it isn't I'd look for some means of making it so. Maybe a disc a diameter slightly more than the ID of a joint with a segment removed. Inserted into the joint so that the cone formed is pointing up, anything falling down the pipe above should then hit the cone flow to the edges and out through the gap made by the missing segment, against the pipe wall.

[Colin Stamp]

I think it probably does come down the wall of the boiler drain pipe. The difficulty was getting it to transfer to the wall of the standpipe rather than just shooting off the end of the drain pipe and free falling the rest of the way. The boiler dumps quite a lot at a time. It has a siphon thing to batch it up.

I've put the elbow on now and it's reduced the noise quite a bit. I reckon it'll definitely be fine now once it's behind the false back of a kitchen cupboard.

Cheers,

Colin.