Any plumbers in here fancy giving some advice please?

We moved into our new house last week and tonight my wife tried running a bath which came out a bit green. We haven’t noticed any discoloration before but up until now we have had showers and not really had much cause to notice discoloration of the hot water.

Cold water is crystal clear. I emptied the green water and thought maybe it just needed flushing through if the house had been left empty for a while. After running just hot water for a full bath it was so murky and yellowy brown that you couldn’t see the bottom. On emptying it there was a scummy film left.

The only thing I can think of is that when we moved in the hot water was so hot coming out of the taps it felt dangerous with you g kids in the house so I dropped the temp on the hot water tank thermostat to 65c.

I am currently flushing the hotwater tank but wondered if any plumbers out there had any suggestions?

Old/used system or new build?

I think the regs are Max 40deg c for any water heading into a bath or any bathing type environment, 60 for other taps. Real plumber will be along to confirm exact temp.

There brown water sounds like rust. What type of system do you have?

If i remember Dante’s Peak correctly then the local volcano is about to erupt.

Has it been left unoccupied for a while before you bought it, perhaps?

As above, what system do you have?

Could be a completely corroded tank internals so your heating water is mixing with your hot water.

So its a gravity fed system, in a 15 year old house. The water is not rust coloured it’s more like something between a stagnant pond and horrendously dehydrated urine. After flushing the tank it’s a lot clearer but not 100%. The house may well have been standing empty for a short while but only a few weeks max.

Could be the coil in the hot water tank has hole in it allowing hot water circuit and fresh water to mix. New tank time..

Drain and clean the cold water cistern in the loft, it’s probably crud from the bottom of that, particularly likely if the water’s been turned off but the taps have been used

what timba said.

if its a greasy organic biofilm that was left, it could be the crap that grows in the Cold tank in the loft coming out as it drains to a very low level if the mains was off while empty and hot taps used.

You’d be disgusted if you knew what ‘can’ get in there if it is an old tank with a non-close fitting lid!

if it was a gritty non-organic residue then could be a leak from CH but unlikely IMO.

Is this really a euphemism for a medical problem that you’re too embarrassed to talk about? 😯

If your “hot water” is coming out of your “tap” brown and murky you probably need urgent medical attention…..from a “plumber” 😉 😳

Might be something decomposing in the hot water tank.

Have you had any water meter recently installed?

Thanks for the advice so far – I’m going to try a full flush tonight including the cistern. I will get up in the loft and have a through look inside and give it a through going over if required. Are cleaning products a bad idea even if I flush it thoroughly afterwards?

Thankfully this is really an issue with my house and not my personal plumbing perchypanther and as much as I rate a lot of advice from the STW massif if I had a manky discharge from any orifice on my body I would probably seek help elsewhere.

Old tanks, storage vessels, pipework and fittings full of sludge.

Have seen old pipes with not far off a pinhole left for water to travel through the rest being nasty hardened brown sludge, that has built up over about 30 years of use!

This maybe helpful…

Are cleaning products a bad idea even if I flush it thoroughly afterwards?

50:50 really. Last time I flushed a system (heating and then hot water, neither had been touched since their extremely poor installation, 20 years earlier) I ended up needing a new HW tank as the cleaning stuff loosened up something that was sealing a hole. So my crap heating system worked as well as it ever was going to, but it was (now) leaking into the rest of the system.

If the stuff that was loosen up was on the hot water side (a distinct possibility) you’ve got to wonder what was leaching into the hot water side of things.

Oh, when we took the tank out, there were some patches on it that were thin enough to poke a screw driver through with virtually no effort. Masses of corrosion………. so all in all, a good thing (semi-planned removal is better than 100 litres of water pissing through the living room ceiling.)