Lifespan of radiators

You dont happen to have a curved wall do you?? :-)

If I did, what would the chances be that the delivery chaps would bend it in the right direction?

As I said in the original post. There's always been one leak somewhere or other that needed fixing before it was worth putting the inhibitor in. I actually bought a gallon of inhibitor shortly after I bought the house and it's been sitting in the garage for 19 years waiting to go in the tank. Then a TRV started to drip. Drained down and fixed that then another one went followed by a couple of rad valves. Then the immersion tank sprank a leak. Soldered that as a temporary fix but realised a couple of stop valves in the system no longer closed water tight when everything was drained down so thought it best to replace those when I got a roundtuit before using inhibitor as again it would all have to be drained down.

Then I came home one day to find a nice man in a van had left me a new immersion tank with the next door neighbours and a note through my door. Who it was actually meant for I have no idea but it was most timely and saved me a bundle. They never came back for it anyway. Fitted that with a mate after some rearrangement of the piping to suit the different tank and every bloody compression joint we had to work on pissed out water when I filled the system back up. No amount of tape, gloop or silicone sealant made a scrap of difference. Even the cap on the tank where the immersion coil goes leaked water despite firstly just using the gasket it came with and secondly trying that plus sealant. Maybe we're just cack handed but I've never struggled with a compression joint before and he's just installed a complete heating system in his own house with no problems. Fortunately the water in this area is so hard it headbuts you if you try to drink it so the limescale eventually blocks minor leaks if you're prepared to wait a while :)

Anyway. In the meantime the three 2 way zone valves which the previous owner had installed to be able to control upstairs heat, downstairs heat and hot water separately had one by one either jammed or started leaking or both. I took the motors off them, replaced one with a stop valve and handle the system manually now with a screwdriver and an adjustable spanner. It'll do until the immersion tank gets moved as part of the renovations and I fit a new zoning arrangement.

Then there's Bessie the boiler which sprank a leak from the steam vent at the back a few years ago, again last year because the washer I'd been supplied with to fix it was the wrong size and now having got that right she's dribbling incontinently from a side cover.

So that's my sorry story of a central heating system which has usually worked but generally leaked and never been quite right enough to not need draining down at some point in the near future. I suppose with hindsight it might have been better to just keep putting new inhibitor in every time I had to fix something but never do today what you can put off until tomorrow I reckon.

On the bright side it's probably quicker and easier to whack new rads in at £30 a pop than try and flush them, sand them down, paint them and put them back again. They're all pretty manky now, even the ones that don't leak.

-- Dave Baker