Recent content by ChrisJP

Running a washing machine when you're not in the house is even madder than altering a thermostat setting when you're not there. Washing machines can, and do, spring leaks and flood the kitchen and then the house if you're not there to turn off the water.

I've never understood why people want to control their heating themostats from a smartphone. Sure you can do it when you're away from the house, but why would you want to do that? When you're in the house, it's hardly a big trouble to walk over to wherever the thermostat is located to alter it.

I think it's a great pity that the older, leak free, siphon flush systems have now been eliminated from all new toilet installations. Siphons went out of favour when water companies succeeded in getting cistern volumes reduced significantly in a bid to save water. The reduced volume meant that...

I agree with terryplumb. The fact that if you run the HW for long enough it does get properly hot indicates that the flow around the HW tank heating circuit is slower than it ought to be, which suggests the motorised valve in this circuit is not opening fully some of the time. The Honeywell...

If you can get access to the base of the cistern where the fill valve connects to the feed pipe (it looks from your picture that you can) then no, you don't have to remove the cistern. You will have to drain it of its water, though, which means turning off the water feed, flushing the toilet...

If it's sold new then it has to be serviceable, otherwise take it back for a refund. If it's a valve already in use but with a fault, then you need to describe the fault before we can advise on repair or replacement

No wall plugs are, as the name suggests, for fixing screws into masonry walls. I don't think they'd actually work in chipboard.

If you've already drilled holes in the chipboard to accommodate the plugs then the screws won't bite into the chipboard. Your best bet now is to use butterfly cavity fasteners which spring out behind the chipboard.

Be careful when sourcing brass screws that you're not sold "brassed" ones. These are ordinary mild steel but covered with something that makes them look like brass and with a rip-off price to match!

I suspect you won't find a valve that matches your old one. As I previously said, the new valve you've got is designed to be pushed through the tank wall and secured by a nut outside, so you may have to remove you existing pipe that goes through the tank wall and substitute the new one.

I'm not clear how your existing old valve threads through the tank wall. The bit with threads on in your picture, which presumably connects to the water supply pipe, looks to be too short to go through the tank wall, be secured by a nut on the outside of the tank and then be secured to the water...

"Immersion heater not working properly switches on at wall both day and night timers green light on boiler is on.." I'm not clear why you are referring to the boiler when your question is apparently about your immersion heater. If, as is usual, the boiler heats the hot water cylinder via a...

One of the reasons brass fittings have shot up in price is because the price of copper has risen very sharply over the last year. Demand for copper has increased a lot - EVs, wind turbines and expansion of the electricity grid has led to highly increased demand. In fact there is some doubt...

But to get to the base nuts, the OP will have to take the toilet completely off the wall. The only way I can think of avoiding that is to see if you can prise the part of the mounting on top of the toilet far enough away from the toilet to get a saw or multi tool in to cut it off. The base nuts...

An alternative is to use a pipe freezing kit just upstream from the valve you want to change. You do of course need to drain the radiator first.