Sodding boiler is playing up

[Mike Hibbert]

Hi Folks,

It's that time of year I guess, but got home tonight and the house is freezing!

Here's what I know We have a Worcester Bosch Highflow 400. The thermostat is ok, it issues the call for heat, and the deman light on the front of the boiler goes on. There doesnt seem to be much noise at that point from the boiler. The pump seems to be "whirring" - if I put my finger on it, it feels like it's turning. The hot water is cold too. It looks like there is no action from the boiler other that showing the demand light.

Things I dont know Why it's blumming cold in the house!

All the rads are cold and we have a two year old who is moaning already about being cold - that didn;t seem to make it any more urgent with British Gas sadly

Any helpful advice?

Cheers Mike

[Dave Starling]

Nip to Homebase or B&Q before they close tonight and buy a couple of fan heaters. A hot water bottle from Boots should keep the kid happy in bed and at least give you a good nights sleep.

Dave.

[mogga]

Electric blanket £20 from tesco with two heat controllers.

[Heliotrope Smith]

Check the pressure if you have pressurised system. You should be looking for at least 1 bar on the gauge.

[Colin Wilson]

Funnily enough, our Tesco has just been expanded to an "Extra", and=20 they only had single electric blankets when we were looking for them=20 two weeks ago.

Ended up with one from Makro with a single control, but it's better=20 than nothing !

[Dave Liquorice]

Child doesn't have outdoor clothes they could wear?

Cuddle up under a blanket with mummy or daddy. I wouldn't recomend going to bed all together. Adults are rather big and heavy for a littlely to tolerate on top of them for long...

Nip out and buy a couple of electric heaters, oil filled radiator type for preference. Fan heaters heat the air quickly but are noisey.

[Mike Hibbert]

Lol - I was more hoping for some "boiler related" advice ;-)

[mick]

Can you see if the pilot jet is lit? You'll probably have to remove the front cover. If it isn't then you'll need to go through the lighting routine - whatever it is for that boiler.

[Peter Parry]

Heat? In my day you got an eiderdown to wear and for entertainment a used lollipop stick to draw pictures in the ice on the inside of the window. In the morning a kettle full of boiled water washed 4 people with some left over for the tea.

After supper (a nourishing soup of boiled sprouts and Sundays bones) you could warm yourself on the glorious heat from the one bar fire before going upstairs to crack the ice from the sheets and climb into a damp bed. You didn't need an exercise machine - you were vibrating enough from the cold to use more energy than a marathon run. Pyjamas were used over your clothes to keep the sheets clean (in case the Vicar visited).

Central heating was only for posh people.

[Phil L]

Damp bed? - you were lucky, we used to live in a box on the motorway, and get up at 5AM and lick the road clean with our tongues....

[Harry Bloomfield]

You had motorways, we just had muddy tracks to live alongside of.

[Jules]

Live alongside of? We had to live there right on the track, in the mud.

[Roger Mills]

Well, it sounds like it's 'all systems go' *except* that the boiler isn't firing for some reason.

Have you got a User Manual for the boiler? If so, there will be a fault-finding/trouble-shooting chart in it. Working through that should tell you what is wrong.

[If you can't find a manual, there may be a copy of the chart on the boiler itself - maybe behind a removeable part of the casing].

As others have suggested, it may be something you can fix yourself - like system pressure or pilot light. On the other hand, it may be something which requires spare parts - in which case you will almost certainly need outside assistance.

[geoff]

Pump - can you actually feel water moving in the pipe either side of the pump ?The impeller could have snapped off the ceramic shaft

Is the fan running ?

If its not, then nothing else will happen

[Dave Liquorice]

Well in the mean time and at this time of year it could mean into next year, you need to get some comforts going. Not having some form of standby heating both space and water makes live very uncomfortable when the primary source disappears.

We've just had a 3 hour power cut, no major hassle, but everything space heating, cooking, hot water has a backup that is easy to get from their storage places and bring into operation. I was sort of hoping that the power would still be off in the morning so I could drag out the generator to fire up the heating system and top up the cold in the freezers. B-)

As to boilers, I don't do gas. We have good old great big lump of cast iron and an oil burner, simple and reliable.

[YAPH]

I'm not familiar with these models but there seem (according to my collection of manuals) to be several versions, including a 'Greenstar' high-efficiency aka condensing type.

Amongst the older, standard-efficiency types there seems to have been a design change around 1997 and some of the pre-1997 models (at least) had permanent pilots lights. If the boiler's cold my money would be on a burned-out thermocouple

Some models, at least, have a heatbank overheat thermostat with a reset button near the top left hand side of the unit, and open flue models had a spillage discharge safety device - if that's open circuit it means the boiler or its flue need cleaning or it is likely to produce carbon monoxide and kill you and/or your kids, so don't mess with that.

[Owain]

Tea! We 'ad water we washed us socks in to drink.

(And before anyone gets jealous, we took turns wearing that pair of socks.)

Owain

[cynic]

We werer so poor that if you didn't wake up on Christmas morning with an erection you had nothing to play with

(Sorry its an old joke but they don't make like that any more)

[Stuart Noble]

But back to the boiler...this situation suggests that it's better to have a boiler where the manufacturer has its own service network. Ok, in the case of WB, you're looking at a callout charge of £200, but at least you know it'll be done in an hour, with no waiting for parts. The current thread on British Gas/Ideal Isar suggests that not all service calls are equal. Talking to an engineer from Homeserve a while back, and he was saying that he does all the Vaillants over a fairly wide area while another guy does WB etc. Each has a Transit size van. The BG vans I've seen around are usually Escort size, so I doubt they carry much stock.

[A.Clews]

Thus spake Owain ( [e-mail]) unto the assembled multitudes:

Socks? Luxury! We went barefoot and made us tea out of old foot scab pickin's.