Vaillant EcoTech 831 Combi installed but rads not working

[rajpatel50]

Had a Vaillant EcoTech 831 installed to replace a conventional boiler. Initially rads upstairs were OK but most of downstairs very very slow to heat up (several hours) with 1 not working at all. Now a few days later all of downstairs not working after 3 hours running and 1 upstairs not working also. Hot water is OK.

Pre-installation they did a power flush and have done one subsequent to the installation but as I said things seem to have got worse.

All rads were working prior to installing the new boiler (a few were slower but would reach top temp within an hour)

Not sure what to do now. Is it reasonable to get the fitter to resolve without paying extra? We've shelled out a load already. We seen to be just throwing money away with no resolution. (he is corgi registered) He says the existing pipework was a bad design (we have an extension prior to when we moved there) which it may have been but it use to all work with that pipework so why not now. He also says some gunk may be lodged somewhere but I would have hoped the flush would have sorted that out.

Some rads are hot at the flow pipe entering the rad but the rad it cold and so is the return out of the rad. Have tried bleeding all rads also. The flow pipe from the boiler it hot and the return is somewhat warm also. He says he balanced the ones upstairs that were getting hotter qucker to improve the flow to the ones downstairs that wern't heating up.

Im wondering whether when they cut out existing pipeing or bypassed something which has caused things not to work properly.

Any advice on how to proceed and what to expect from the fiiter is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Raj

 

[Strachan]

Get your installer back to sort it. I install alot of the 831s and it should kick ass on your heating! Congratulations on your choice of boiler, can`t say the same for your installer.

 

[micky p]

it is very hard to say what is going wrong.
I wouldn't point the finger at the installer as he might of done a good job. Sometimes it annoys me how people can pass judgement about installers on here when they havn't seen the work. It may well be a bad job but i can't see that from here.

It may well be something simple like balancing or could need some pipework altering. best bet is get the installer back.

 

[Agile]

Yes Micky but surely a competent installer should be able to identify and fix the problem.

It always annoys me when an installer says a boiler is faulty. I ask what is the problem and they dont know. I then reply if you dont know what the fault is how are you so sure its the boiler!

Tony

 

[sime10]

Raj do you need central heating in asia

 

[Strachan]

On a personal note, if i`d have installed the boiler and the rads were not working, i`d have staid and found out why. And 2 powerflushes kind of shows lack of belief in the first one. The installer should have at least tried to get to the root of the problem, not took the money and left it up to the customer to find out why his shiny new boiler isn`t doing the job he spent all his hard earned money on.

 

[micky p]

has the installer refused to come back? if not give him the benifit of the doubt.

 

[ChrisR]

Flow problems that bad are pretty obvious when powerflushing. Part of the procedure is to put all the flow through each rad in turn. If nothing much happens the operator has to find out why!
Equally there might be an old bypass pipe short-circuiting the lot. Easy to prove - start from cold, shut all the rads then see if the return pipe gets hot.

If there's an old calcified lump of rust blocking a pipe, powerflushing won't clear it. Whether finding and sorting it is included in the original fee, depends on what was agreed before the start.
He may well be right - flakes of magnetite can get shoved up against a fitting to make a blockage worse than it was before he started. But for example, if you put a hosepipe on the flow pipe at the boiler and another on the rad's flow valve, that should be obvious. If you take the valve off (trv's have tiny holes) you sometimes get a pint of grot.
If you use more aggressive chemicals (like Fernox DS-40), you can dissolve more of the resistant stuff as long as there's some flow, but in older systems it's more likely to "find" leaks.

I would say it's his responsibility to get it all right, and a certain amount of effort from him would be reasonable, without further charge. But there can come a point where unforseeable work has to be paid for.
If you don't pay for what's been done, he's going to walk off the job and you'll be in a worse situation, but if you do, then he's liable to be "too busy" to help you further. Obviously this can be difficult if there isn't good trust between the parties.

 

[the plumbing miracle]

dont listen to the "experts" on here mate take it from me the problem with your boiler is that on the programming of the vailant boiler someone has probably set the heating to low run ie using under floor heating on the display get into the service mode and change d30 to no 2

 

[Agile]

If that were the case then all the rads would be running but just not very hot.

He has described a differential heating problem!

Funny how the original posted has apparently disappeared though!

 

[rajpatel50]

Just an update. My fitter returned and made an adjustemnt to a valve which I beleives connects the flow and return and this seems to resolve the issue with rads now heating up as they use to.