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Central Heating Help!

View the thread, titled "Central Heating Help!" which is posted in Central Heating Forum on UK Plumbers Forums.

B

Ben Owens

Hi all,

Apologies for the lengthy nature of this post but I amhoping for ideas on how to troubleshoot our central heating system before weneed to call out a professional!


We have moved in to a house recently where the centralheating system is a bit less familiar to us as it is a sealed system and wehave only ever had the more traditional gravity feed systems before.
The set-up is as follows: in the garage, we have a PottertonNetaheat boiler with an expansion vessel to the side. In the lounge, we have adigital Horstmann DRT2 programmable room thermostat. In the kitchen, we have aHoneywell ST7100 7 Day 2 Channel Programmer which we usually leave on manualfor both the hot water and central heating cycles and just use the roomthermostat to turn the heating up and down. Upstairs, we have a hot water cylinderwith an immersion heater in the airing cupboard.
The problem we have been experiencing for the last few daysis that, whilst the thermostat is set to e.g. 22 degrees, the temperature isreading as around 19 degrees. The little flame symbol is coming on whichusually triggers the boiler to roar in to life but, for some reason, this isnot always happening. Even when the radiators come on initially, they soon gooff before the temperature has reached its 22 degree setting; the flame symbol is stillshowing, indicating that the boiler should still be going but it has actually switchedoff and the radiators start to cool down.

The boiler appears to be working ok as it comes on to heatup the water after e.g. running a bath and the radiators have been coming onand off sporadically throughout the day, just not warming up the house to as high a temperature aswe would like.

So far, we have checked the pressure on the boiler which isset at 1 bar. We have changed the batteries in the digital thermostat and havealso reset this separately. We have removed all of the timed programmes fromthe digital thermostat and just left it on a manual temperature but to no avail.We have bled the radiators which all seem fine. And now we’ve run out of ideas!
Are there any other fundamental checks that we have missed?Has anyone had this problem before and knows what the fix may be? We would begrateful for any suggestions.
Many thanks.

 
Temp stat on boiler causing premature cut off. Turn dial to max, and if that fails, you will need a professional.
 
So your problem is simply that the room stat is set to 22 degrees,but room is constant a t 19?.

One of:
Room stat calibration wrong
Reference thermostat calibration out
Rads too small
Rooms too big
Boiler stat set too low

Have you tried turning room stat higher?
What is surface temp.of rads. Do they "feel" hot all over?
What is boilr stat st at
 
Hi. Thanks for your reply. Over the weekend, the system seems to have 'perked up' a bit. We set the room thermostat to 28 degrees and over the course of Friday and Saturday, the heating kicked in and thermostat started reading as 25 degrees. Obviously it was too warm to keep it like that so we turned it back down to 22 degrees and now this is what it has been reading as ever since Saturday night. Very confusing! Am not sure if something has been kick started by cranking the room stat up but then guess it can't be working fully as it would have reached 28 degrees? Anyway, for clarification, the thermostat on the boiler is currently set to 'max'. When the heating kicks in, all of the radiators get really hot with no cold spots or anything. We didn't have any problems with the heating at all last winter so am pretty confident that the radiators etc are all the right sizes for the rooms... it's just the temperamental firing up of the boiler that seems to be a problem! With reference to calibrating the room thermostat - is this something that we can do ourselves?

Thanks!
 
Do you have a thermostatic valve on the lounge radiator (TRV)?

Might be time to get the boiler serviced.
 
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