Another boiler repair carried out this week! This time in Brentwood, Essex. The customer called complaining that the hot water is fluctuating, going from hot to cold! After giving the customer advice over the phone of what I believed the problem to be, they booked a call for the same day.
After investigating, found the problem to be the secondary heat exchanger to be blocked, or as some call it the plate heat exchanger. This is actually a very common problem for a lot of people. This usually comes down to poor installation. If the system isn’t cleaned properly when installed you get a build up of iron oxide, or whats more commonly known as ‘ Sludge ‘. Then over time this starts to make its way back into the boiler and causes al sorts of problems. This time the sludge made its way back into the plate heat exchanger.
After draining down the boiler, the plate heat exchanger was removed and replaced. So now the boiler is working perfectly! Now the boiler needs to be protected from this happening again, too many engineers will walk away happy with the repair, but if the boiler doesn’t have protection, the same thing will just keep happening or worse. So after talking to the customer we advised that a system filter be fitted to the heating return to catch and sludge making its way back to the boiler. The filter was then fitted to the pipework, and the job was complete.