The boiler... again.
Mar. 7th, 2015 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnThe warranty on our latest central heating boiler - a Vaillant - ran out on 19th Jan, so obviously the boiler - erratic throughout its 5-year history - has now decided that It is All Too Much and has given up the ghost, with an error F76. Rosie Roo woke me at 6am to complain that she was cold and Brythen refuses to let her get in bed with him. Now she is suffering an existential crisis, because she wants to be on her sofa, but she also wants to be in front of the gas fire, so she keeps trotting from one to the other. I am NOT moving her sofa in front of the fire...
I didn't write it down at the time, but I'm pretty sure that this is the error the boiler gave last time it died in November 2013, when the gas engineer fixed it by drying the whole thing out with a hair dryer. It means the primary heat exchanger has died (major part), or possibly, that a connection to the heat exchanger is playing up. Fingers crossed. I may try the hair dryer again. But can we possibly need *another* boiler? Surely it is unusual that our boilers fail so regularly.
If we have to replace it, maybe we will try getting one from Calor this time. Calor sell us our LPG, so they really should know which boilers work best on LPG. It's not *that* unusual a fuel, but you really pay through the nose for not being on mains gas - not just for the gas deliveries but fires and boilers etc seem to be more expensive and harder to come by.
At least our recent negotiations to get some solar panels installed have turned up the fact that the hot water tank does have an electric immersion heater which I'd previously not noticed. So with a bit of luck we will at least have hot water, even if we can't rely on the sun to provide the power for it yet.
ETA: the boiler is fixed! Tried an exciting new plumber, a Cornish one rather than a Devon one, name of Artifice Plumbing. He came within 2 hours, twiddled the pump to release an air bubble, and it is working again. Hurray! this weekend's task: bleed all the radiators... :-(
I didn't write it down at the time, but I'm pretty sure that this is the error the boiler gave last time it died in November 2013, when the gas engineer fixed it by drying the whole thing out with a hair dryer. It means the primary heat exchanger has died (major part), or possibly, that a connection to the heat exchanger is playing up. Fingers crossed. I may try the hair dryer again. But can we possibly need *another* boiler? Surely it is unusual that our boilers fail so regularly.
If we have to replace it, maybe we will try getting one from Calor this time. Calor sell us our LPG, so they really should know which boilers work best on LPG. It's not *that* unusual a fuel, but you really pay through the nose for not being on mains gas - not just for the gas deliveries but fires and boilers etc seem to be more expensive and harder to come by.
At least our recent negotiations to get some solar panels installed have turned up the fact that the hot water tank does have an electric immersion heater which I'd previously not noticed. So with a bit of luck we will at least have hot water, even if we can't rely on the sun to provide the power for it yet.
ETA: the boiler is fixed! Tried an exciting new plumber, a Cornish one rather than a Devon one, name of Artifice Plumbing. He came within 2 hours, twiddled the pump to release an air bubble, and it is working again. Hurray! this weekend's task: bleed all the radiators... :-(
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no subject
Date: 2015-03-07 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-08 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-07 11:36 am (UTC)I hope that yours is trivially fixed!
no subject
Date: 2015-03-08 10:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-07 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-08 10:28 am (UTC)Oh well.