G
Gazzie
Hi,
We had our bathroom refitted about 8 years ago. Part of the change involved moving a towel radiator to a different wall within the bathroom. The plumber cut the existing (8mm, microbore, gravity fed) pipework under the floor an attached plastic pipes. The plastic pipes went under the floor and behind a cavity wall, attached to 15mm copper pipes and then to the radiator.
The radiator got hot for about 2 years and the heat has slowly dropped to being almost non existent.
The radiator hardly gets warm. The only time it gets slightly warm is when all the TRVs on the other radiators (all the other radiators get hot) are shut. "Slightly warm" is about 1/2 hot as the other radiators.
The radiator is currently getting hot at the pipe entering the radiator, but the radiator itself is cold. The outward pipe is cold.
To date, we've...
After making all of these changes, the radiator is "slightly warm" when before it was stone cold.
My gut feeling is that there's an airlock in the pipework. I could hire a plumber to connect the central heating pipework up to the mains water supply and reverse the flow to clear the airlock.
I've got slightly less of a feeling that the plastic pipe has bent due to heat and gravity of the pipe, restricting the flow. We have similar plastic pipes in the airing cupboard and they're made out of thick material so I'd expect they wouldn't bend. Also, accessing the pipework is going to make a major mess of the bathroom.
Does and airlock or bent plastic pipes sound feasible? Could anything else be causing the issue.
We had our bathroom refitted about 8 years ago. Part of the change involved moving a towel radiator to a different wall within the bathroom. The plumber cut the existing (8mm, microbore, gravity fed) pipework under the floor an attached plastic pipes. The plastic pipes went under the floor and behind a cavity wall, attached to 15mm copper pipes and then to the radiator.
The radiator got hot for about 2 years and the heat has slowly dropped to being almost non existent.
The radiator hardly gets warm. The only time it gets slightly warm is when all the TRVs on the other radiators (all the other radiators get hot) are shut. "Slightly warm" is about 1/2 hot as the other radiators.
The radiator is currently getting hot at the pipe entering the radiator, but the radiator itself is cold. The outward pipe is cold.
To date, we've...
- Had a course of sludge remover
- Power flushed
- Replaced the TRVs for manual traditional valves
- Fitted a Spirotrap to the central heating system
- Drained down the system several times thinking it'd clear the airlock (if that's what it was).
After making all of these changes, the radiator is "slightly warm" when before it was stone cold.
My gut feeling is that there's an airlock in the pipework. I could hire a plumber to connect the central heating pipework up to the mains water supply and reverse the flow to clear the airlock.
I've got slightly less of a feeling that the plastic pipe has bent due to heat and gravity of the pipe, restricting the flow. We have similar plastic pipes in the airing cupboard and they're made out of thick material so I'd expect they wouldn't bend. Also, accessing the pipework is going to make a major mess of the bathroom.
Does and airlock or bent plastic pipes sound feasible? Could anything else be causing the issue.
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