Re: Central Heating Pumps, and Pump Ball Valves

[Set Square]

(First a story, mainly ranting and letting off steam, then there's a

> question at the end) > > Just bought a pair of Pump Ball Valves (screwfix id 13885) and a > Pegler Terrier Circulating Pump - TC5 (screwfix id 67174) to replace > an ageing and > noisy central heating pump. Didn't intend to use the Ball Valves - > rather hoping to re-use the originals, and isolate the pump with > those for a 10 minute replacement job, bought them simply to bugger > up Murphy's law and use > as back-up, well, they were cheap. > > > The question is... for someone with experience of plumbing and central > heating... Just what is the trick of the trade to mating the Ball > Valves to > the pump bodies?, I imagine with play in the pipework it would be > fairly straight-forward, but for existing installations, with no > such play, how do > the Pro's handle this?

The valves which you bought do look exceptionally tight in terms of interference between the big nut and the ball spindle. The equivalent Peglar valves - albeit at 8 quid a pair - do appear to have much more room to manoeuvre - as do the gate valves shown.

In order to be able to swap a pump easily, you need to be able to undo the nuts in parallel fashion until they are clear of the joining flange. If you can't, the valves are not fit for purpose!

[Mike Dodd]

LOL, okay, the tools £10 for the 32mm, and £18 for the 300mm adjustable, the difference between buying the pump from Screwfix and buying from B&Q; I do try to pay for the right tool for the job on the assumption that I (or someone I know) will find it useful in future.

And yes, the rant was a way to calm myself down by looking at the funny side of the whole thing.

-- I am using the free version of SPAMfighter for private users. It has removed 3077 spam emails to date. Paying users do not have this message in their emails. Try

for free now!

[Mike Dodd]

Yes, upon reflection, the Peglars would have been a better choice, but I was being a tight-arse and didn't think I'd need them. Oh well, live and learn.

[John Stumbles]

Screwfix do a F*** Off great water pump-type pliers which will grip the union nuts on a CH pump. B&Q do one too, but screwfix's is about half the price - about £17 compared to £30 or so.

However there are always situations in which you can't get whatever tools you have onto the fitting you want to dismantle, or can't get enough force on it to shift it (or it's just plain welded up) and end up having to cut out and re-do more of the pipework either side.

Your story illustrates why I personally don't quote fixed prices for jobs like this: if I allowed for half of the gotchas which could arise the price would sound like something off Rogue Traders, and if I quote for how much it should take if all goes well I'm liable to end up catching the mother of all colds when it goes TU.

I am using Mozilla which is free: free-as-in-speech _and_ free-as-in-beer. It has removed more spam than you can shake a very big stick at, and doesn't insert its own spam into my messages.

[Mike Dodd]

Which I'm now trialing, yes, the SPAMfighter stuff was bugging me; all I need now is to work out this wierd Mozilla stuff.

[John Stumbles]

If you've used Outlook Excess (ptui!) you'll find the look'n'feel much the same. Tools->junk mail controls gets you to the spam filter (but it's so long since I set mine up I can't remember how you do it). Works pretty well though it'd be nice to have the sort of 'how we decided whether this message was junk' info you could get from popfilter. (I think that was what it was called: a separate baysian filtering pop3 proxy written in Perl, which I used with OE before I switched to mozilla (and more lately, to Linux).)