Stringy looking bacteria from hot tap... why?

where does you hot water come from? (i.e. combi boiler, hot water cylinder etc).

it comes from a hot water cylinder... and having run the upstairs hot taps, it seems to also come from there too, particularly the bath. Any ideas?

Get up in the loft and have a peer into the tank that supplies the cylinder, to see if it's full of gunge.

Si

Or worse. I could recount my story about the decomposed drowned rat in the header tank but not this close to tea time eh?

PS. It may be a good idea not to come in contact with the water until you know what is causing it. Stick with the cold tap in the kitchen, this should be high pressure mains and not via any of your own storage.

Ugh!!!

I'm so trying not to follow this thread. It has an unanwered question. Has any of this water been bathed in / drunk?

Please, I don't want to know... I want to enjoy my dinner...

I cleaned the attic tank about six months ago, there is a layer of brown sediment at the very bottom, this is naturally occurring I am led to believe. But the hot water cylinder cannot be cleaned/ sterilised like this... Ive been told that I should get a plumber to siphon out the contents and disconnect it to see what is inside, and then sterilise it with Fernox Sterox.

What temperature is the tank thermostat set to?

We dont have a thermostat, just a bath/sink option. The bath option heats more water than the sink one obviously. It can get very hot, I just don't know how hot. The cylinder has only been installed two years.

I would go and have a look in your cold water tank and see what if anything is floating in there for starters!

Also do you have any dead legs of old pipework that rise somewhere but have then been capped off? This can be a nice breading ground of stagnant water.

I take it this is heated by an electric immersion heater then? If so you can find the temperature on the immersion stat - this is often under a disc on the top of the heater. You normally need to remove a small screw to take the disc off and reveal the stat. Make sure it is set to 65 deg C or hotter to make sure you kill anything unwanted.

hiya john... yeah, i see the screw and cover (with Therm on the top, silly me) , but its tiny, and i dont know what will fit around it to remove it...

I have just unscrewed it, but there is no immersion stat underneath, so I dont know whats going on..

There is usually a little pointer type device there to set the temp. It may be you have a fixed temp immersion, in which case one would expect it to be high enough.

Well, it gets very hot indeed if left on for an hour or two, but we havent used it very much at all in the last 4-5 months, relying on central heating to heat the water. I put on the immersion for a couple of hours today to see if it would help, and there is hardly any of that organic material coming from the taps now... much better. I wonder why this happens though?

In message , None writes

A bit worrying that it "gets very hot indeed"

Does anything here look familiar??

Ah, ok you have an indirect cylinder with heat input form the boiler as well. In which case is there a cylinder stat strapped on to the cylinder somewhere? You might want to check the boiler is getting the tank hot enough.

Would the boiler have a temperature reading? Im at work, so cant check... also, should hot water be always maintained at or above 65 deg? Is that even doable?

The boiler may well have a temperature control for its primary water circuit. The cylinder will normally also have a thermostat that controls when heating for the cylinder is demanded. There is often a programmer involved somewhere as well that would also need to call for heat for the boiler to fire and reheat the cylinder.

You want the cylinder to get to at least 65 at some point each day to ensure that any bacteria in it are killed.

Just checked the hot water again, still seem to be getting some greenish feathery bacteria in there, I wonder if I should use some bleach in the system to have more drastic effect...