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My dad has just moved into a new house. It’s been empty a while with frost protection on and a combi boiler.
Everything seemed to be working just fine. I turned up all the radiator thermostats to max to warm the house up, and adjusted the heating program so it fits with when my dad gets up. I didn’t adjust the bathroom radiator/towel rail thing as it didn’t have an obvious knob anywhere.
It has had a new bathroom and shower (upstairs) in quite recent history. Everything else in the house is quite old.
Since I left, the bathroom radiator isn’t getting warm, and there is no hot water in the bathroom or from the shower.
Is it possible there’s an isolater tap for the bathroom, or something like it somewhere that we might have knocked by mistake? Pressure on the boiler looks to be in correct range.
Any ideas welcome!
Stand down! He fixed it. Found a thermostat on the bathroom radiator and it’s now hot and the shower works too. I thought water and heating were separate systems but IANAP.
Oh great mysteries of central heating. He’s never had it before, so I imagine I may end up resurrecting this thread in future!
Glad it's sorted. I'd be interested to hear from any STW experts how a radiator thermostat could affect the shower and taps
combi boiler
Doesn’t that mean it heats the hot water on demand rather than a system boiler like mine that heats a big tank of water?
Maybe it just took a long time to flush the cold out of the piping from the boiler to the shower in the bathroom?
Tip
Check the current boiler heating water pressure - do it when cold/off (should be a gauge or display, possibly displaying a value of about 1 to 1.5 ish get the manual for the boiler, check what the pressure should be and find out how to top it up , if it’s too low most combi boilers refuse to fire up. And they generally go down over time .
Also find out where the condensate pipe comes out, (to the outside world from the boiler), as these can freeze over and stop the boiler, you can defrost them (see boiler manual, online help and Google)
*imho - boiler service contracts, esp British gas ones may not be as good as they sound.
But you tend to need an annual service to maintain the boiler warranty (which can be as long as 12 years), so I’d check up on that as well.
@stwhannah - I believe some installers in the past cheekily ran the bathroom hot water supply through the towel rails to avoid having to plumb it in properly to the central heating especially if it would mean surface pipes or chasing channels into concrete floors.
Definitely a bodge but might not be that uncommon, as domestic heating and hot water systems can vary quite widely in implementation! 😂
Combi turns off the ch pump whilst hot water is required. A spinny wheel in a pipe detects flow ans fires the burners.
If heat is on the ch pump stops to allow the burner to heat the water going through the heat exchange
Double check that the towel rail is not electric. If its on a thermostat it may well be, alot are also dual fuel, so you can run it solo in spring or autumn.