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Which central heating filter is best. Magnaclean Pro 2 v Spirotech MB3 v Fernox TF1 sludge filter test
Which heating filter is best My name is Alan Hart and today I’m going to give you my opinion on central heating filters.
So we’ve got a few different filters here, we’ve got the Fernox TF1, we’ve got the MagnaClean Pro 2 and we’ve got the Magnabooster 3 from Spirotech.
We’ve also got an old Spirotech filter there, which is the Magnabooster 2.
So I’ve now been fitting central heating filters for probably about 10 years since the first MagnaClean’s come out and I went through all the issues with filters leaking.
I went onto TF1s. There are a few issues with TF1s. We went on to these ones, which wasn’t great in my opinion. They didn’t collect any muck at all or if they did it was very hard to see.
So here we’ve got the MagnaClean Professional 2, MagnaClean Pro2. If we have a look inside there, what we’ve got here, is we’ve got a magnet in this. And that’s just covered by this sleeve here. In my opinion, this filter’s very effective. If you have look inside there, it’s got a drain at the bottom. With push-fit connections, which again I find very good. And they just push fit onto there.
The MagnaClean is a very popular filter. One, because it’s probably one of the best for collecting stuff. Lovely, thank you. It’s got an O-ring in there. It’s quite thick O-ring. And when you tack that onto there …
Just a few examples here of sludge that we found in central heating systems and how effective the filters are.
So here we’ve got the Spiratech MagnaBooster 3, here’s that magnet that’s on the outside, that just slides off. The issue with that is sometimes they can fall off. The clips don’t seem to be very good on them. We’ve got a clip up on the inside there and they can just fall off. I’ve seen customers with them taped on.
This is one we’ve removed from a system cause the system was so sludged. So one thing I do find about these, I found that these valves here are quite faffy, they don’t tend to fit on very well and when you try and turn them you’ve got to really be … got to have a good grip on them. So I find that the magnets on these are quite small and they don’t seem to collect much muck to them. I’ve fitted quite a lot of these, I’ve been back to them year after year, I’ve cut the filters up as you’ve probably seen in some of my other videos. And I still don’t think they catch as much muck as other filters do.
We have found gunge on the O-rings which seems to indicate it could be sucking oxygen in, causing corrosion. This is one of the samples we’ve removed from a MB3 So here we’ve got the Fernox TF1. So we’ve got it’s valves. The valves are very reliable, I’ve never had any issues with valves. The connection’s here, it’s a big flat face so O-rings connecting really well onto that face there. So you just need to nip them up and then they’re fine. The early ones of these did tend to have problems on leaking. So they did leak from here, because this design was different on here. This was thinner and the washers tended to just fall in so they didn’t seal very well. And then on the bottom of here it were just glued on, whereas now these ones they have a washer in here which again is much better, personally I’ve not had any of these leak at all.
You have got to be very careful that you tighten the lid up on the top, tighten it right up to there. And then if you do that they don’t leak, I’ve never had one of these new ones leak. I think these are a really, really good filter. Although I don’t think they catch quite as much sludge as the MagnaClean does but the benefits of this one is because it’s got the valve on the bottom it’s easier to clean out. It’s also easy for flushing the system when you’re installing a new boiler.
So for me this is a very, very good filter.
My overall opinion of the Fernox TF1: I think this filter is absolutely superb. It’s very good art collecting sludge, probably not quite as good as the MagnaClean but overall, because it’s got the valve on the bottom and because you can clean it easier, you can just slide the magnet out of the top, like that.
So for ease of use, just take that valve off and just clean it out. For ease of use there’s no better filter on the market in my opinion.
