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Yes indeed. thanks very much for your help - next time I’m in Wales I’ll buy you a few pints!

Yes definitely a little action there. also did a magnet check on this T with no sticking to the pipe. is this likely the T section you said can cause problems (it’s just by the hot water tank)?

So………. i managed to find this little beauty! Im wondering if that is an auto vent (that maybe ceased on the auto bit). opened it and there was gurgling and eventually water came out. fired up the boiler and it got going, much gurgling, but didn’t stop straight away like it had. But would go into anti cycling mode, but not turn off and get going again after it had cooled down again. Eventually some low heat to radiators, but not smooth. went up to the vent again to open and see if it would let air out (a little came out). trying hot water now and it is consistently working at a high temperature so that’s good! if I continue to struggle to get the hot water working properly am I right to think that going back to open the vent is a good idea to try and get rid of any more air? and is it likely an auto vent that has ceased to auto vent and that I could replace it with a functioning auto vent?

The pump is in the hot water cupboard upstairs and I’m pretty sure it is higher than the bleed point on the rads.

Clicked the button on the wilo. It made some different sounds for the duration (the display said it was doing the auto bleed). Eventually I stopped it after 15 minutes. Did it a couple times. no automatic air vents on the system as far as I know

One more question for anyone. when you bleed a non automatic pump you do it until you get water coming through. when I used the auto bleed function on the wilo I didn’t at any point have water come out and the bleeding then stop. Should there be water coming out at the point it successfully bleeds all the air out ?

Thanks for the replies Nick. so you don’t think there is anything obviously structurally wrong with the pipe work?

There is very little pipe work to see. Gas enters from the bottoms and flow and return on top.

Do you mean a drain point on a low radiator?

Boiler probably replaced 10 years ago, old leaky rads replaced for new less than two years ago, no real issue since last week

1.Yes I did open them. 2. auto bleed button pressed and on for a while 3. Well, I’m not sure how to answer that so I guess no. I didn’t test that when I had the pump off, maybe I should have. But the isolators seemed to twist shut and open nicely.

Glad my pump woes are generating such a lively conversation! good news - managed to swap over the pump fine. No leaky isolators, all went well. Thanks chaps. bad news - similar problem, boiler fires up on demand and quickly gets too hot on flow pipe and my boiler (Vailant ecotec plus 415) comes up with F72 error (flow and/or return NTC fault). Ran the auto bleed function on the WILO for 15 minutes, tried with the circuit isolators (silver boxes - don’t know actual name!) manually opened, same result. Pump seems to be running fine just no flow from the boiler. Spoke to Vailant and their technical support said the F72 error meant the problem was external to the boiler. Spoke to plumber (too busy to come out but happy to do a video call while I was trying to get it working) and he said most likely an airlock or maybe sludge build up (though most of the rads were changed a few years back). Spoke to the gas safety check people (who came on Monday for the yearly checkup and reckoned it was most likely the pump) and they have suggested draining, changing a bit of pipe work (more below), filling with cleaner and circulating for a couple days, drain again and fill with inhibitor. the pipe work that they thought needed changing I presume is the ‘u’ section you can just make out in the pics (close up on second pic) on the return pipe work next to the boiler. He reckoned that was an airlock liability and I presume the plan would be to run a ‘t’ straight across to the main return pipe from the down pipe and getting rid of the ‘u’ does that sound like a reasonable plan? Pics in next post

Just seen this. Ok I will do. Does that still influence whether the boiler will work for the heating if there is no call for hot water?