Powerflush on Microbore pipework that is blocked. Powerflushing a Blocked Central Heating System. Central Heating System not working.
Today I’m doing a day in the life of a plumber. So I’m doing a powerflush today but it’s a powerflush with a little bit of a difference because one of the pipes has got so bad, it’s actually blocked. So it’s going to be a little bit tricky. So normally we’d come. We’d just do a powerflush and that’s fine. That’s just another day at the office.
But when we’ve got pipe that’s blocked it’s a lot more tricky because you can’t get the chemicals to go into the system where you want it to go to flush it. So we’ve got to get flow through it so we can get the chemicals through it. So what I’ve got, I’ve got a little trick today. So I’m going to take the radiator valve off, and I’m going to pump some air into it just to try and unblock it and then we’ll see if we can get powerflush machine to go around it then. And if we can, then we should have cracked it. So, let’s go inside. Let’s go and have a look.
So this is the offending radiator here. So this radiator just will not get warm. So the pipe on the left gets a little bit warm but there’s no water flow through it. So even when we take this pipe off here, no water comes out of that pipe on the right hand side. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to get a foot pump, and I’m going to try and I’m going to put some pressure in that pipe and I’m going to see if we can unclear the blockage in it. So, we’ll do that now.
So I’m going to pump a bit of pressure in it now and see what happens. So we’ve connected the powerflush machine in now. We’ll put those chemicals in. for a little while. So we just connected in the pump adapter in that boiler. So we can see there, we’ve got some flow coming into it now. It’s still not brilliant. So I’m just going to reverse the flow in this now and I’m going to see if that makes a difference.
So we can clearly see the difference now. We’ve actually got flow through the bottom of the radiator and we didn’t have that before. Right, let’s have a look at this one now. It feels a lot warmer as we come in here already so let’s get thermal imaging camera on this. So this is the Seek thermal imaging camera. We’ve got 60 degrees there now coming into the radiator and it’s a lot warmer now so I think we’ve cracked it.
Machine only goes up to about 60 degrees so think we’ve cracked it. I think it’s doing what it needs to do now. So the problem we had with this radiator was this pipe is microbar and it blocked up over the years. But we’ve managed to get it clear now and it’s full working. So what Ill do is, I’ll add a little clip on end just to show you the temperature the radiator is now with me thermal camera, and yeah. fortune.
So if we can see on there now, it’s 69 degrees. The actually full radiator is really hot but this thermal camera is not very good to be honest. I’m going to go back to me FLIR I think.
