Not putting the heating on – how’s it going…?

Hmm. Pump wasn’t backwards – boiler was plumbed the wrong way round. That’s why I have bubbles in the hot water – it’s now going backwards through the tank.

Someone mentioned earlier that steam coming out of the flue was bad – I just happened to look at my neighbours and saw steam pouring out so I went to look at mine – there was definitely some steam coming out although looked to be much less than my neighbours. I have turned the temp on my boiler down though… won’t it be the case that steam will always be visible in cold weather when the hot moist exhaust gases from the boiler mix with the cold air or do I need to turn mine down more?? I did have it lower than it is now but the rads didn’t seem to get hot enough so I turned it back up a notch…

boiler was plumbed the wrong way round

🙄🤦‍♂️😯

I have turned the temp on my boiler down though… won’t it be the case that steam will always be visible in cold weather when the hot moist exhaust gases from the boiler mix with the cold air or do I need to turn mine down more??

Yes there will always be some as a proportion of the exhaust gas. Lower return temps mean more of it is condensed and more heat is recovered from it. You turn your temps down as low as you can before a) it starts short cycling (turning off and on rapidly) or b) you find the house just isn’t warming up.

You turn your temps down as low as you can before a) it starts short cycling (turning off and on rapidly) or b) you find the house just isn’t warming up.

Ah OK – thanks. Mine is probably roughly OK then…

boiler was plumbed the wrong way round

Is that those experts* FrankConway talked about earlier ?

* Paid per install new build installers doing it as rapidly as possible.

Just a heads up, I found my warm start / comfort mode has been turned back on at some point, likely during a service. This mode keeps an amount of water preheated 24/7 to allow quicker hot water to taps.

You may want to check your boiler to ensure that if it has one it isn’t being used unnecessarily, apparently makes 5-10% saving.

Mine burns 3 minutes every 90 minutes to keep 48l of hot water ready to go…….

I’ve just rewired the systems to put a stop to that…..

But think about that over a year…..it’s a considerable number of days burning…. 1/2 of which when your asleep and 1/4 or more when your at work or not needing hotwater……

Mine burns 3 minutes every 90 minutes to keep 48l of hot water ready to go…….

That’s probably more than mine is on for a whole year

Mine burns 3 minutes every 90 minutes to keep 48l of hot water ready to go…….

I’ve just rewired the systems to put a stop to that…..

@trail_rat mine does something similar, seems v wasteful, not optional though according to the manual. What did you do to stop it? Any potential downsides (apart from waiting slightly longer for hot water, I guess?)

Zilog. Depends on the boiler.

Mines a grant oil boiler….and manual states to link perminant live to the hot water live.

I just linked up a 2 Chanel thermostat with on demand hot water. (Drayton wiser)

With 50l stored outside in the boiler – I stopped heating it at 8.30 and at 13:30 I was still able to run a sink to wash some dishes and had to use cold to make it manageable.

If I need more hot water than that 50l can provide I need to manually boost it. – baring in mind if I drew a sink full at 9.30 it would add equivalent cold from the mains so it would cool considerably quicker.

molgrips
Full Member

Hmm. Pump wasn’t backwards – boiler was plumbed the wrong way round. That’s why I have bubbles in the hot water – it’s now going backwards through the tank.

Out of interest – does the feed leave from the top or bottom of the boiler?

I can’t see any markings, nor any mention in the installation & maintenance manual of my boiler that describes which is which…

Out of interest – does the feed leave from the top or bottom of the boiler?

I can’t see any markings, nor any mention in the installation & maintenance manual of my boiler that describes which is which…

On mine, both come out of the top. The manual has multiple diagrams that imply which is which although it’s not especially clear.

But I only got to that point by discovering the weird behaviour with the temperatures when I was trying to establish the correct temperatures. It was not doing what I expected, and I eventually realised that what I was seeing could be explained by the water flowing backwards. That’s when I checked the manual.

Swapped the boiler pipes over, and 0ut the pump the other way again. I had to drain it because the membrane has split in the CH header tank. Pressurised it all and now I am waiting for the wireless stat to connect to its base unit before it starts up. It may explode.

It may explode

Dibs on the Mercedes. 😉

Dibs on the Mercedes

Thought it was a Passat??? 🤔😉

This is the Passat thread all over again 😃

Have I monopolised it? Or provided the entertainment? 🙂

Or provided the entertainment? 🙂

Depends. Was the radiator on either car plumbed in backwards? 😉

Don’t put ideas in his head…

Smart meter is a fiver off £600 for the month. High and windy cold area south west of Glasgow, not wholly surprised given the minus 10 period early in the month.

Gas CH is on all day as I usually wfh and wife and boys are sometimes around and about during the day. Modern (20 yr old) 3 storey 4 bed detached, double glazing and doors all brand new.

Hive keeps house at 18 overnight, warming to 20 by 8am and 22 by 5 pm, cooling again by 11pm.

Was the radiator on either car plumbed in backwards?

I have no reason to think that, everything is working perfectly. I only mess with stuff when it’s not working optimally, you see.

Hive keeps house at 18 overnight, warming to 20 by 8am and 22 by 5 pm, cooling again by 11pm.

18 overnight?!!
No wonder your bill is £600.

I only mess with stuff when it’s not working optimally, you see

A Mercedes then? 😜😜😜 (soz. Couldn’t resist. Merry New Year 😁)

Hive keeps house at 18 overnight, warming to 20 by 8am and 22 by 5 pm, cooling again by 11pm.

I like! That’s the sort of temperature I like.

My average day temp until heating starts is 13.5c and once heating starts it will go to 16c but only for few hours at night.

Delta T at the boiler has now gone back down to 10C which is what it was originally. Somehow the flow is more restricted in the reverse direction. The bubbles have gone from the hot water circuit though.

For some reason I can’t explain, delta T at the boiler is much lower with the pump going the original direction but the boiler pipes swapped round. Somehow the flow must have been way slower in the opposite direction. I did think maybe the bypass valve was faulty but I’ve changed it and it’s slightly better but still not great. It was originally about 8-10C, then with the pump flipped it was 20-25C. Now, with the pump flipped back and the boiler swapped correctly, it’s 10-12C. I can’t reduce the flow any more, otherwise it’s too low and it short cycles like mad as the flow isn’t even enough to cool the heat exchanger.

Weird.

It wa because the valve that sends water through the hot water coil is stuck open. Even when the rads are all cold, the return temp was 40C which isn’t possible unless the water is coming via the hot water tank. So I isolated the hot water circuit and I could hear the pump sound change, and now the DT is back where it should be.

£185 gas/electric for December. Probably £40 of wood on top. Running the wood burner halves the gas usage for a cold day.

£300 Gas & £75 Electric for December £775 in credit before that, at least one of us WFH each day, all 4 of us off work/school for past 2 weeks, hoping Jan will be milder and I’ll be in office more.

£115 combined
460kwh gas ch and hot water
129kwh electric, lights, tele, oven etc.
Ok, so maybe 100 hrs of wood burner use in that figure, but my wood is free.
Not horrendous at all.

Electricity: £23.25 for December (combination of some solar but mostly battery storage).
Oil: Not sure. Probably about 2 litres / day, so £60-70 for heating and hot water.
No gas.

2L/day?!
Really?
😫

Can’t be arsed to trawl back through various posts but, in response to one of my mine which referred to using experts, I wouldn’t trust a middle ranking/middle class/middling ability IT ‘manager’ with my CH system any more than that they would trust me with their domestic IT set-up.
Molgrips has been a prolific poster – was your installation done by a plumber on a piece rate to complete an estate-wide target (think splash’n’dash in decorating terms) or was it by a specialist heating engineer?
If the former, which seems likely, you get what you pay for; it works – but inefficiently.
Your problem, not mine.

So you want me to try and find a specialist heating engineer to come out to my house and pay him to do.. what? Tune up my heating? It takes hours, essentially I’m trying to coerce a badly designed system to work as efficiently as I can. If you were a plumber, would you spend hours and hours trying out different settings, tweaking things measuring temperatures? If I asked for that service I’d get laughed at. Tradespeople don’t do stuff like that. They’d go ‘well mate this is crap you need a new boiler/a whole new system’, and they might be right. But I simply haven’t got five grand for that.

So why not learn how it works and figure out how to optimise it? Are you suggesting I’m not somehow capable? I suspect you are with this comment:

I wouldn’t trust a middle ranking/middle class/middling ability IT ‘manager’ with my CH system

Is that what you think I am? I do work in IT but I’m not a manager, or a “manager”. My job is to diagnose and fix issues with systems. The ones I work on are software, not heating, but the software is MUCH more complicated than a domestic central heating system; the process of understanding and figuring out what’s wrong and what can be done is pretty similar. So yeah I’m confident that I have the intelligence and aptitude to learn about what’s in my house and improve matters. You don’t think that – but I’m not sure why.

Do you pay people to do everything for you? You take your bike to a bike shop all the time? Do you pay a gardener? Do you pay a decorator to decorate? It must be nice to be that rich. You may have overlooked that this system was recently “serviced” by a well recommended plumber. I was expecting him to at least clean out the combustion chamber on my boiler, but he didn’t. If he had he would have noticed how screwed up the system was. He didn’t do any diagnostics other than put his hand on a radiator. On the other hand, over the last couple of months I’ve found and fixed several small faults and one major one, and tuned the system for much greater efficiency – and it’s cost me less than £50 in tools and materials.

I’ve got the controller set to 18° for most of the daylight hours into mid evening, and 14° for nighttime. That seems to keep the house pretty tolerable.

November’s dual-fuel bill was £170. December came in at just over £270, and we were away for the Christmas week (I’m sure I put the controller in ‘holiday’ mode at a low target temperature for 6 of those 7 days) so the cold 10 days or so in the early part of the month made a big difference in Dec.

17 feels a lot cooler when it’s mild and damp than when it’s cold, I reckon. I’ve put mine up a couple of degree since the cold weather – although obviously far less gas is burned in milder weather even with the increase.

frankconway
Full Member

Can’t be arsed to trawl back through various posts but, in response to one of my mine which referred to using experts, I wouldn’t trust a middle ranking/middle class/middling ability IT ‘manager’ with my CH system any more than that they would trust me with their domestic IT set-up.

But the premise of heating system installation has been dumbed down so far that even an ‘expert’ doesn’t actually know much about the system. With the 10 week wonder courses being so acutely targeted to achieve maximum compliance and pass rates, Dunning Kruger is rife!

As a professional cable muncher, it galls me every time I see a ‘central heating wiring centre’ (box of spaghetti with a strip of choc blocks). This could very easily and for not much extra cost be improved markedly, both in terms of neatness and electrical safety. It could even be made with proper push fit terminals that would claw back cost on install time – so a win win.

Now things have been made even worse by the advent of smart heating – no it **** isn’t smart or it would actually take control of the system properly rather than piggy backing off the thermostat!

Find me a tradesman who isn’t just someone with a bit of experience who is willing to have a go and I’ll bite your arm off…

So why not learn how it works and figure out how to optimise it? Are you suggesting I’m not somehow capable? I suspect you are with this comment:

Don’t feed the troll. He’s already called me an idiot further up the thread for living in a cold house without knowing the first thing about my financial situation.

I put X400 cleaner in the system and the instructions say to leave it running on full for 2hrs, so I put it up to 20C and turned up the flow. It’s now 22C upstairs and I’m roasting. How do people live like this?

How do people live like this?

I have no idea. I was staying with my dad over Christmas and he left the heating on one night by mistake. I woke up in the middle of the night absolutely roasting and that was ‘only’ 18°C!