Powerflushing a Central Heating System in Leeds.
Power Flush on a gas boiler central heating system. Today we’re doing a power flush on an open vent system, and we’ve been called out to an Ideal Logic. The customers wanted to put this onto a service contract, and the energy supplier has said that it needs flushing, so that’s what we’re here to do today. What I’m going to do is, I’ll do a overview of what we’re doing, and I’ll take all the pump out, and I’ll show you how I flush a heating system. Let’s go and have a look.
With this type of system we have a header tank up in the loft. What we’ve got here, we’ve got us flow that comes up from the boiler, it goes up through the filter, so we’ve got a Spirotech filter on this. Then, we’ve got us pump, it goes around here, and then we’ve got a heating zone that goes for the heating. Then, we’ve got another zone valve there and that goes for the hot water cylinder. What I’m going to do now is, I’m going to take this pump out, on here. A bit of a change of plan, the nuts on the pump is quite hard to get off so what I’m going to do is I’m going to take the filter out, and I’m connect my adaptor in there. I’m going to remove the filter anyway because I’m going to put it on return, because it’s always better on the return. Let’s take this out. I need to remove this olive off here, so I’m going to use this Monument olive puller. It just makes it a bit easier. You can see in there, it’s definitely got muck in it.
So, I’ve connected machine in there, them connectors, and then if we have a look, I’ve also connected the MagnaCleanse in. What I’ve done with the MagnaCleanse is, I’ve took one of the connectors off, off the MagnaCleanse, and then I swapped it. Put it onto the hose for the power flush machine, and on the other end of that, this is off the blue hose. I’ve just made it so that we can adapt it, so we can use the MagnaCleanse with this power flush machine. This has got a combined cold feed and expansion. This is actually blocked, so that’s something we need to sort out as well. Those magnets are nice and clean to start with. We’re just flushing it now.
I’ve connected the cold feed there, and I’ve put an hose pipe on it. What I’m doing now is, I’m running the tank, and we’re just trying to clear that pipe out. I’ve just been trying to wash this tank out, still got a bit more to clean out of there yet. I’m going to put some power flush chemicals in now, you can use various different manufacturers chemicals. Then, we’re going to heat the system, let it run round for about half an hour to an hour with all the radiators fully open. Then, once we’ve done that I’m going to turn all the radiators off, apart from one, and then I’m going to let the machine flush through that with the chemicals until that’s clean.
Then, what I’ll do then is reverse the flow on that, and just make sure that that radiator is nice and clean. Then, what we’ll do, we’ll go to the next radiator, open the next radiator, and then we’ll turn the last radiator off. Then, we’ll do that all the way round the system until all the radiators are all nice and warm, and all working. Then what we’ll do is, we’ll start dumping it, and we’ll put cold water in, and then we’ll dump it as well, at the same time. I’m going to go do that now.
We can also do this with the boiler running on this one, so we’ll get heat into the system. It’s been running now just for a few minutes. We can see there, it’s already got quite a lot on it. That one as well, so we’ll clean that out now. Then, we can check with the thermal imaging camera, so you can clearly see on that that we’ve got a lot of flow on the right hand side there. Then, we’ve got flow on the left hand side as well. We just need to get this a bit better. This thermal imaging camera is not great to be honest, but it gives us an idea.
According to this we’ve got about a 74 now on the bottom of the radiator, and you can see it sort of stops there, and then you can see then we’ve got 53 and 67. We can see at the bottom of that radiator, that’s still got sludge in it. Going to just reverse the flow on this now. I’ve turned the boiler off now but we’ve still got the flushing machine going round. If we have a look at the temperature there now it’s about 67 at one side, it’s about 69 at the other, and then in middle we’ve got, it’s about 65, 66, 65. It’s certainly made a big difference now.
We can see there, that we’ve just got a little bit more just to clear out, so it’s warm on one side and it’s warm across all the other side. Then, we’ve just got that. We’re going to turn the machine back and forth to try and clear that. What we’ll do, we’ll go back and forth with the flow on the machine and we’ll get that cleared out, and then we’ll move onto the next radiator, and then we’ll do the same again.
Right then guys, that’s it, all done.
