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Heating System Leak

  • 20-09-2010 1:25pm
    #1
    reilig
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,401 ✭✭✭


    Just a small bit of advice for any of you suffering from heating system leaks or drops in pressure in your heating system. I'll share my information and my fixes.

    My plumber installed a log gasifying boiler for me this time last year. Its been great. It has a 1500 litre buffer tank which feeds the house. i have instant heat with it and ccouldn't have a better system.

    The whole system is pressurised and when cold is about 1 bar and when fully heated goes up to 1.3 bar. This is the normal working of a gasifying boiler. However, from the very start, the system has been losing pressure. At the beginning, it was losing about 0.5 of a bar every day. The plumber put this down to air. He did a lot of work replacing air valves and bleeding the system and fixed a small leak on a bypass valve (which had been bought pre assembled). This was great and saw the pressure loss go from 0.5 bar per day to 0.5 bar per month. I figured that 0.5 bar is about 2 to 3 litres of water from the system. My plumber put it down to air in the system and said that it could take months to get out of it. he was back recently and fitted an automatic filling valve which he said will take care of the problem and allow it to fix itself.

    Last saturday, my brother in law was with me to do some finishing of trim around my stairs and dowel the door frames (final finishing). He noticed that one of my skirting boards had gone black and put it down to mould. Said that it might be a small leak from a shower in the bathroom that was the other side of the wall. He sealed it up with silicone, but as he was doing it, he noticed that the grout on some of the tiles in the bathroom floor looked damp - we haven't used the shower there in about 2 months. So he did some testing with a moisture meter and found the grout around one of the radiator valves to be very wet. It was only a half tile so we took it up and brole the concrete down to the joint on the bottom of the radiator pipe to find a lovely puddle of water there. A quick check with a spanner showed both nuts on the joint to be loose. We tightened them up, but a lot of water flowed into the hole - it appeared to be flowing back through the qualpex pipe insulation. I soaked the hole out with tissue paper all evening saturday and by yesterday morning the hole was dry. I'm leaving it open for a week or two, have switched off the automatic filler valve on the boiler and going to keep an eye on the pressure gauge on the boiler.

    Just goes to show you, the plumber that i trusted, gave up trying to find a leak and went for a quick fix just to shut me up. His quick fix had the potential to do a lot of damage to my house in the long term if it went undetected.


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