Plumbers advice reqd.

cosmowillie53

An upstairs hot has stopped flowing. It has been a bit slow over the last while but has fully stopped today.
I took tap off and replaced washer (incase it was blockingflow ) but it made no difference. The taps/pipes are about fifteen years old.
I live in a hard water area but all other taps are working fine. The tap in question is about six feet from hotwater cylinder.
Any ideas for an average d i y man.
Thanks in advance

handydandy

A quick test that might help.

If you have access to feel the hot water pipe from the cylinder to the tap, you could try and feel the pipe to where it is hot and roughly where it gets a bit cooler, maybe there is a blockage, maybe it is not leaving the cylinder at all?

Joey the lips

If its the only hot tap blocked its most likely a blockage. The trick now would be to find out where by checking along the circuit.

Not an easy job for a novice and usually requireing 2 people to switch on and off the water at the valves.

danjo

Could be an airlock. Connect a short piece of hose between the hot and cold taps and turn both on for a few seconds. If there is an airlock this may clear it.
Read something recently about a poor layout that caused airlocks. I think the take off for the tap was too high. So if this problem recurs then I get a plumber to look at it.

Buford T Justice

danjo wrote: »

Could be an airlock. Connect a short piece of hose between the hot and cold taps and turn both on for a few seconds. If there is an airlock this may clear it.
Read something recently about a poor layout that caused airlocks. I think the take off for the tap was too high. So if this problem recurs then I get a plumber to look at it.

Could be, but the air has to have gotten in somewhere first. OP, was anything done on the plumbing recently?

cosmowillie53

Thanks for ideas folks..
I cant access pipes near cylinder to check for heat/cold .

No work has been done on the heating in recent times.

For some reason there is now a small flow of water back again from that tap which is good but I still want to get back to full flow.

Any other ideas which doesnt involve taking up floorboards or employing a plumber (yet) are welcome.
Thanks.

ART6

cosmowillie53 wrote: »

Thanks for ideas folks..
I cant access pipes near cylinder to check for heat/cold .

No work has been done on the heating in recent times.

For some reason there is now a small flow of water back again from that tap which is good but I still want to get back to full flow.

Any other ideas which doesnt involve taking up floorboards or employing a plumber (yet) are welcome.
Thanks.

Your posts suggest that other hot taps are OK and that it is only this one that is giving problems. If that's the case then an airlock is unlikely since there is no real reason why it should only affect one tap. You say that the tap is close to the cylinder, so maybe it is the one most used (a bathroom washbasin tap for example). If that is so then I would suspect something is blocking the pipe -- a bit of debris will naturally follow the route to the most used tap.

The solution of forcing water from a cold tap back through the effected tap is always a good remedy, but it's no use simply connecting a bathroom cold tap to it's adjacent hot tap as they are both under the same pressure. You need to connect the kitchen cold tap to it as it is the only one under mains pressure. A length of garden hose and a couple of tap connectors would do it.

If that clears it then it suggests that your attic header tank needs a clean out and possibly a lid if it doesn't have one.

cosmowillie53

Problem solved.
I took the center park out of the tap out and replaced it with one from an old tap I had and bingo its works.
Thanks for all replys

Sparkpea

good you got it sorted, sounds like the tap was sticking maybe. A quick fix is replacing the inside like you've done, otherwise cleaning up the spindal would have worked probably. In future a good way to test is to count how many times the other tap (in your case cold tap) has to be turned to be open full, you may find that the cold would open e.g. 6 turns but the hot is only turning 1-2 so its not opening properly and is 'sticking'. Hot taps normally stick more often than cold but what you also find is that people only open a tap 1-2 turns so the water doesn't splash out and eventually thats all it will open.