As I think was probably expected by both us and the heating engineer, the heating packed up again yesterday, leaving us with a pretty chilly house come yesterday evening. As before, the hot water part of the system was working fine, with the boiler firing up quickly whenever required to heat the water.
As before I put in a call to the helpline number, and as before they couldn’t find me on their computer and had to put me through to someone else – I’m seriously going to have to write to their customer care department to at least get the right number to phone first! The first call was made just after 5pm yesterday night, and having explained that it was a follow-on from the problem earlier in the week, the service agent said she would raise the call immediately.
Earlier in the week, when I’d called at about 7:30pm, I had a call back and an appointment from the engineers within about 30 minutes – but that didn’t happen yesterday. By about 8:15pm, when I still hadn’t received a callback, I phoned them again, and was told that normally they wouldn’t expect me to get a call if I’d raised the issue after 5pm, as the call was set for next day resolution (no explanation as to why it was set like that) but that I would get a call by 11am the next morning.
It has to be said that by 11am this morning, when I still hadn’t got a call back, I was sitting ready with the phone, and the sheet, to chase it up. Again I had to go through two service agents to get someone who had my details, but ultimately they did produce an instant response. Almost immediately the second agent asked whether this was a continuation of the problems earlier in the week, to which I said yes, and I got a call back within five minutes, and the engineer was there within the hour. This produced an interesting reaction from the heating system of course – which this morning it hadn’t been working. On being told that the engineer was coming within the hour, both Beth and myself had a shower, and Beth did some washing up to clear a space around the boiler for the engineer, and lo and behold, the heating came on!
It was the same heating engineer as before, and so he didn’t bother to check the boiler, and instead took a look at the control system – and thankfully did manage to get it to reproduce the problem during his visit. He also gave us an explanation of how the system worked, which fitted with the symptoms, and a way to manually kick off the heating system, or at the very least get some heat if only the hot water part of the system is working.
The picture shows the main parts of the system in our upstairs cupboard (and also that the builders of the house decided to paint the cupboard walls after the tank had been put in place) including the component that has the problem. So for those of you not used to how UK plumbing and heating work, a quick explanation. Firstly, the big blue thing is our hot water storage. The heat is provided by a gas boiler that is located in the kitchen that heats both the water in the heating system, and provides the hot water. The brains of the system is the little control panel on the wall, which has separate timers for both heating and hot water. Wired to this are two thermostats, one for the hot water, that can be seen towards the bottom of the tank, and one for the heating that is located in our hallway. When the control system calls for hot water or heating, it initially checks the relevant thermostat to see if anything is required, it then uses an electric motor attached to a valve on the pipes, contained in the white box towards the bottom of the picture to switch between pumping water from the hot water tank, or the heating system, down to the boiler. Once the valve has switched, this box activates the pump (the big red thing on the pipe above the valve), and finally fires the boiler. The key thing is that it will only fire the boiler when it knows that the valve has switched – which it detects through two micro-switches in the unit. The problem seems to be that the micro-switch in our unit that detects when the valve has switched to heating is intermittently not closing the circuit, so the boiler and pump are never being started. However the switch for the hot water is fine, hence this starts up every time. Needless to say they are going to have to get hold of a new unit, but come Wednesday it should be replaced, and hopefully we’ll have reliably working heating again.