Heating is not what it was.

Have small 2.5 bedroom terraced house, which seven days ago had a worcester greenstarRi boiler fitted on the back wall in the kitchen to replace the 25 yr old potterton boiler that live in a tiny boiler shed outside.

After installation it took a few days for all the rads to come on tickerty boo. Was told by the fitters when they left that the air in the system had to work its way out.

Today its 4 degrees outside, and since i had to go to the shops i decided to press the manual button to delay the heating coming on. when i came back later I switched the timer back to auto and was conscious of waiting a long time for the rads to heat up. The thermostat was set to 21 centigrade and the temperature downstairs was about 17. The green light came on the boiler indicating that it had fired up. The heat control on the front of the boiler is set to three quarters on.

Now the heat on from the *old* boiler started warming up the rads downstairs after about twenty minutes.

This afternoon i kept a log of what was going on, since nothing much seemed to be happening by way of the rads heating up.

After an hour and a quarter the small radiator in the ground floor rear room/kitchen was hot. The big radiator in the same room was barely warm. Also barely warm were the radiator in the grd floor front room and also all three bedrooms upstairs were barely warm. The towel rail in the bathroom though was hot.

This suddenly all seems so much slower than a few days before. After one and half hours both radiators in the two main bedrooms upstairs are still not very hot, more like very warm. And finally after some 2 and a half hours they are all hot except the first floor rear bedroom is kind of hot, but not brilliant.

The Grundfos AlphaA2 pump is on the 'II' setting.

It all seemed to be working a lot better a couple of days ago, but this is the first time i interupted the auto setting on the timer and turned it off and on again manually.

Novis grateful for any suggestions.

Reply to
john MacArthur
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Turn up the pump. You may then also want to turn the primary circuit thermostat up, this is presumably the heat control on the boiler.

NT

Reply to
Tabby

Sounds like the system isn't balanced. Hard to tell if that's all that's wrong though without either fixing that, or doing some more investigations. I wonder if the opened all the lockshields fully to flush the system, and then never reset/rebalanced them?

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

who installed it - British Gas or a local firm

and how/why did you choose them?

(I'm on the verge of installing heating too!)

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Reply to
Gill Smith

Yes, that happened here last year when the system was flushed out.

Reply to
Tim Streater

If you chose a small local firm buy the boiler and any other major components yourself from a major supplier or better still direct from the manufacturer. That way the contract is with them not a small firm who can so easily cease trading.

Mike

Reply to
MuddyMike

I would do nothing more than bleed the radiators and if that doesn't help then simply call the company who installed the boiler and tell them of the problem. Providing the boiler has a high enough output it should be able to warm up all the rads within a few minutes so obviously there is a something not right either with the installation or the setup.

If there IS air in the system it will be characterised by the rads being hot at the bottom and cool at the top and is more likely to affect upstairs rather than downstairs rads.

I would not recommend meddling with the pump or the lockshield valves, I would simply get the company out to fix it.

Luke

Reply to
Luke

"john MacArthur" wrote

Hi John

You don't say what size (output) your boiler is, but I have a Greenstar 24Ri heating a 4 bed detached house. As others have said, recommend you get the installer back. Could be air in the system, but if it worked well for a while, I would be surprised if there were still large enough pockets to cause the issues you have. Worth wandering round and feeling pipes where they are accessible. This way you will learn which is the flow (the hotter of the pipes feeding each radiator) and gain some understanding of the piping layout/routes.

Phil

Reply to
TheScullster

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Thanks to all for your suggestions. Today i bled all the rads. The rad in the upstairs back room let out masses of air. And now all the rads and the towel rail are working upstairs.

But downstairs is a different story. The very small rad in the back room is still coming on, but the big radiator on the ground floor back room and the big rad in the ground floor front room are still as cold as ever.

None of the rads seemed to expell air when i bled them except the upstair back room rad, which let out masses of air.

The big rads downstairs which are still as cold as anything did not expell any air. This seems a real mystery to me. Grateful for any further ideas, thanks.

Reply to
john MacArthur

It sounds to me like a flow issue, specifically that sufficient flow is not reaching all the rads. Probably causes are a dodgy pump, blockage or simply the system being out-of-balance.

You can rule out the latter two by closing of the valves on all the rads bar the cold one and see if that then heats up (given it now has the maximum amount of flow available all to itself).

Mathew

Reply to
Mathew Newton

You've probably got some trapped air in the pipes - which won't be cleared simply by bleeding the rads, but will still prevent proper circulation.

If you turn of all the rads, and turn on one at a time until the only one on gets hot, that should shift the air to somewhere where it can be bled out - and all should then be well.

If there are one or more rads which don't get hot even with all the others turned off, come back for some more drastic remedies.

Reply to
Roger Mills

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turn off by any means all hot rads. Turn pump full up

bleed cold rads once airlocks get blasted into em.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

+1
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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bleed cold rads once airlocks get blasted into em. =================================================================

Many thanks to all, its worked a treat. I set off shutting down all the hot rads, and put the pump on the high setting. First i shut off the small rad in the kitchen (its nearest to the boiler) and then the one in the hallway and then shut down the big ones upstairs (in the main back bedroom and main front bedroom , and then the small one in the small front upstairs bedroom.

By this time already the two big main ones downstairs (the big one in the kitchen and the big one in the front room ) which were both *not* working before......they then starting coming on straightaway.

They are all now working.....thanks guys.

I bled all the radiators and only got what seems to me a small amount of air from the radiator in the back bedroom. So *little* air and so much problem !!

The thermostat for this system is in the hallway, The hallway is very small (The whole house end of terrace is small anyway). The hall radiator is near the front door. The hall heats up very quickly and is telling the thermostat the house is hot enough. but the kitchen is still not up to the same temperature. I would like to restrict the flow to this radiator so that the thermostat is more influenced by the kitchen temperature, rather than the hall temperature. (There is no door between hallway and kitchen).

I also want to restrict the flow to the towel rail in the bathroom, but that is easy to do since it has a round handle type knob on the valve. But the radiator that I want to turn down in the hallway has no such knob. Just an identical square nut on the valves at each end of the radiator. The question is please, does it make any difference which end of the radiator I turn down to restrict the flow? Thanks again.

Reply to
john MacArthur

Don't any of your rads have TRVs or LSVs on them? I'd get one of each installed on each rad toot sweet. That will give you a lot more control

- you can balance the system then so each rad is getting more or less equally hot.

Reply to
Tim Streater

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