Heating/Hot Water Woes

I've been a little quiet on the topic of heating and hot water.  I wish this was because everything had been working perfectly and there was nothing to say, but unfortunately that's not the case!

The last time I updated you was Wednesday 16 April when Graham commissioned the boiler, but the electrician hadn't wired the hot water cylinder stat to the boiler, so he was coming back on Friday to fix that.

Well, he did indeed come back and wire the stat to the boiler and we switched the immersion off and the hot water on... and the radiators got hot.  Something was definitely wrong.  I still don't really know the specifics of what was wrong, but both the hot water and heating buttons on the programmer caused the heating to come on.

At this point we decided to cut our losses and get a different electrician in.  The first guy had no experience wiring heating systems so it was clearly out of his comfort zone, so Graham recommended a friend of his who he had worked with loads of times.

We reverted back to immersion-heated water again and were grateful that at least the heating was working...

Rich (electrician #2) was scheduled to come on Friday 25 April.  All good.

On Thursday 24th I had my shower in the morning and noticed the water was a bit...well...tepid.  I checked the hot water cylinder and found that Ian had turned off the immersion (I think to see how long the water would stay hot).  To ensure he would get a hot shower, I flipped the immersion switch back on, and thought nothing more of it.

In the evening, after dinner, we went to wash up... and there was no hot water.  Strange, since the immersion had been on all day.  We went to check it out and the switch was on, but the red LED was off.  We went to flip the switch back off, and it wouldn't.  It was jammed in the "on" position but there was clearly no electricity coming through it.  We switched the circuit off and took the faceplate off, hoping to see the reason it was jammed.  We couldn't see anything but it was clearly buggered.  With no hot water from the boiler and no immersion, we had no hot water provision beyond a kettle ;)

We went to bed very late, sick and tired of the problems and contemplating the virtues of cold showers at home vs hot showers at work for the morning.

We both opted for the cold shower (to be fair it was more tepid than cold but still not my favourite morning experience), I headed to work and Rich (electrician #2) came round to sort out the wiring mess.

I heard from Ian around 9:30 that Rich had sorted out the mis-wired valves and he had also discovered there was still a wire missing from it all - there should be both a permanent live and a switched live running to the boiler, so that when the programmer/stat tells the boiler to stop firing, the pumps can continue to run.  Electrician #1 had only run a switched live, so every time the boiler stops firing, the entire thing shuts down (like turning your computer off at the wall) and every time it receives the instruction to fire again, it runs through its startup test cycle before it can do anything else.

He didn't have time to run the permanent live so will come back another time to fix that.  It shouldn't do the boiler any harm in the short term.

He also replaced the immersion switch, which had melted inside and fused solid.  Erk.  Apparently it could either have been a loose connection, or simply that the switch was old and knackered.

So!  Hurrah!  Rejoicing!  We had both hot water AND heating!  All sorted, yes?

No.

Of course not.

On Friday evening we got home and the house was cold.  We had no heating.

Still, at least it's April now and not too chilly, around 17 degrees first thing in the morning.  Back out with the electric radiator and fan heater.

Rich came back on Saturday morning and found a loose connection inside the junction box - his fault!  Whoops!  At least that meant all it needed was tweaking and - finally - we have both hot water and heating (plus immersion) working at the same time.

I'm hopeful that is the end of this saga...