I've only lived in older houses with two tanks in the loft. So this is new to me!
My sister-in-law phoned me tonight asking for help with her heating system. Her house is about 10-15 years old. Original heating system. It's plumbed in ~8mm pipe AFAICT - quite badly - e.g. radiators installed 10 degrees off horizontal!
She has a hot water cylinder in her airing cupboard, and some kind of tank (she doesn't know what, how many, what size) in her loft.
Is this going to be a vented (open) heating system, an unvented (sealed) heating system, or is there no way of knowing without further quantifying the tank(s) in the loft?
She was phoning because she's had two plumbers out to it, and it's still not working properly:
One plumber fitted a new radiator in the conservatory, but it didn't work. He said her system needed flushing (quite possible - some rads didn't get warm before).
Another plumber came and flushed it, and said the conservatory radiator wouldn't work properly because it was just T'd off the kitchen radiator, and the pipes weren't big enough to feed two rads. The other rads worked really well after flushing.
The first plumber came back, said "yes, some plumbers might think that, but it will work" and proceeded to balance the system (he said it had never been done). At that point all the radiators were warm (some not hot, but warm).
Two days later, two rads upstairs aren't getting more than tepid. Not great, given all the snow and ice!
Any ideas? She's not even sure which plumber to drag back to try to fix it.
I've told her that she can't do any harm by adjusting the lockshield valves on the cold radiators by 1/4 turn then 1/2 turn to see if it improve matters (suggested taking a photo first so she can put them back!) - but ultimately the way the new conservatory radiator has been installed may make it difficult (or impossible?) to balance.
She's tried bleeding the radiators, but only water comes out. If it is a sealed system, then I assume that means she needs to open a tap somewhere to put some water in, but she doesn't know anything about this.
What do you reckon - balancing, some sludge left in, an air lock, an unwise addition, or something else?!
Thanks in advance.
Cheers, David.