Posting this on behalf of my Nan who has been experiencing issues with her central heating system periodically for the a number of years, and thus far no-one has offered a solution that has provided a permanent fix.
She lives in a 1970s bungalow with central heating throughout. The combo boiler is around 15 years old and is in her kitchen, she has an immersion heater in a tank in the airing cupboard.
At the moment, every few days she’s losing enough pressure in her system meaning that she has no hot water. She has to call out my Dad to repressurise the system every time it happens. She can use the immersion heater as a backup, but it’s not ideal, and we’re thinking ahead to the winter when the issue will affect her heating.
The fixes that have been applied previously are:
Recently she’s had an engineer out on 2 or 3 occasions, but anything they’ve attempted hasn’t resolved the issue. The latest engineer’s notes were that there’s a leak in the system, but he can’t identify from where. He told my nan that her boiler is fine despite its age, and that it isn’t the cause of the issue.
Most of the pipework in the house is exposed, and neither my Nan or Dad can see a leak anywhere. With it being such a small house, they expect that if there was a leak in the pipework that causes the pressure to drop by 1 bar every few days, that there would be some sign of the leak.
Because this has been going on for so long, and there have been multiple engineers that have looked at it without providing a permanent fix, my Nan doesn’t know what to do next. She’s willing to get the boiler replaced if need be, or to get whatever pipework replaced if there is a leak, but no-one seems to be able to help in confirming what/where the issue is.
If anyone can offer any advice, perhaps with how we can try to diagnose the issue, or whether there’s something obvious that could cause this issue, it’d be a great help and hugely appreciated. I understand that the best way to diagnose an issue is to see it physically, but because my Nan hasn’t had any luck with that route she’s lost faith in local engineers.
She lives in a 1970s bungalow with central heating throughout. The combo boiler is around 15 years old and is in her kitchen, she has an immersion heater in a tank in the airing cupboard.
At the moment, every few days she’s losing enough pressure in her system meaning that she has no hot water. She has to call out my Dad to repressurise the system every time it happens. She can use the immersion heater as a backup, but it’s not ideal, and we’re thinking ahead to the winter when the issue will affect her heating.
The fixes that have been applied previously are:
- A replacement of the immersion heater (this happened without the rest of the family’s knowledge, and the immersion heater never actually had an issue as far as we know)
- Leak sealant applied to the system.
- Some other repair that was described to me as something that inflates inside the system - I have no idea what it is though.
Recently she’s had an engineer out on 2 or 3 occasions, but anything they’ve attempted hasn’t resolved the issue. The latest engineer’s notes were that there’s a leak in the system, but he can’t identify from where. He told my nan that her boiler is fine despite its age, and that it isn’t the cause of the issue.
Most of the pipework in the house is exposed, and neither my Nan or Dad can see a leak anywhere. With it being such a small house, they expect that if there was a leak in the pipework that causes the pressure to drop by 1 bar every few days, that there would be some sign of the leak.
Because this has been going on for so long, and there have been multiple engineers that have looked at it without providing a permanent fix, my Nan doesn’t know what to do next. She’s willing to get the boiler replaced if need be, or to get whatever pipework replaced if there is a leak, but no-one seems to be able to help in confirming what/where the issue is.
If anyone can offer any advice, perhaps with how we can try to diagnose the issue, or whether there’s something obvious that could cause this issue, it’d be a great help and hugely appreciated. I understand that the best way to diagnose an issue is to see it physically, but because my Nan hasn’t had any luck with that route she’s lost faith in local engineers.
