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My Nightmare Heating System


newhome

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1 hour ago, Onoff said:

Can't wait for the precis on on this road trip! 

 

(Though a lot of the technicalities may escape me! :) )

 

Will be leaving the technical speak to@Nickfromwales and @PeterW 

 

From my perspective:

 

heating working in all rooms - tick!

solar working - tick!

rooms heating rapidly (as opposed to taking 24-36 hours to increase the temp by about 3 degrees) - tick!

enough hot water to fill a bath / shower - (even the big bath) tick! 

extension connected up - tick!

able to run hot water without the heating being on - tick!

TS not emptying itself of hot water within about 30 mins without the boiler being on constantly - tick!

 

Plus everything has been labelled to within an inch of its life. A magnaclean filter has been fitted, various new pumps etc have been installed. I have a new outside tap, the loo in bed 4 now works and various other things have been done, including them sorting through the endless pile of shite here helping me understand what I should keep vs things to throw away. 

 

Massive massive thanks to @PeterW and @Nickfromwales, and @PeterW‘s mini-me Will (who consumed his body weight in Tunnock’s tea cakes). I can’t believe that Nick and Peter have never met before as they seemed like guys who had worked together for years. These guys put in more hours to fix the things here than I could have imagined possible, fuelled by bacon, beer and coffee, and some good humour, with lots of banter. 7am and they are already up swapping some things over when they didn’t finish until gone midnight last night. 

 

And Will is going to come up again to finish the other bits and pieces here when I will finally be able to say that my build is completely finished. It’s been a pretty long haul after everything that happened here. 

 

Buildhub rocks! I could never have imagined when I initially posted about my vat claim 2 months ago that it would also be the key to sorting my heating woes and other unfinished bits and pieces. 

 

 

 

 

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Sterling work gents. Given how much beer and bacon you got through, would it have been cheaper to just buy a new system? o.O

 

When you've had some rest, we'd all love a brief summary of what went wrong and what you did to fix it.

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19 minutes ago, jack said:

Given how much beer and bacon you got through, would it have been cheaper to just buy a new system? o.O

 

Be interesting to see how much they get when they weigh the cans in let alone the copper & brass! :)

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4 minutes ago, Onoff said:

 

Be interesting to see how much they get when they weigh the cans in let alone the copper & brass! :)

 

24 cans of beer, 10 bottles of Stella, and a bottle of wine. Plus the pints in the pub some nights ;). Sunday morning was a bit rough all round and fuelled mainly by Lavazza. I was treated like the anti Christ when I arrived back with caffeine free Diet Coke :D. Fanta and Irn-Bru soon had the blood sugar levels topped back up though ;)

 

 

 

 

 

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Just now, jack said:

 

Or "what's-the-point?" Coke, as I like to call it. 

 

I LOVE the taste of Diet Coke unfortunately.

 

I enjoy the odd ond as a pick me up. Rarely drink it though as it makes my joint aches worse I'm sure. Can't stand "full fat" Coke (too sweet) or the caffeine free (why, as you say) ones. 

 

 

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Same as you, I very occasionally - once every few months maybe - crave a full-strength coke. Unfortunately, the last couple of times I've given in to the craving I haven't enjoyed it at all. The last time was last week and I think I'm now officially off them for good. 


Can't stand the taste of artificial sweeteners in anything. 

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2 minutes ago, jack said:

Same as you, I very occasionally - once every few months maybe - crave a full-strength coke. Unfortunately, the last couple of times I've given in to the craving I haven't enjoyed it at all. The last time was last week and I think I'm now officially off them for good. 


Can't stand the taste of artificial sweeteners in anything. 

 

I don’t drink any soft drinks generally as I would rather drink plain water. I had no idea there were so many different types of coke so by the time I’d passed the peach, vanilla, cherry and zero cokes to get to diet (as requested!) I didn’t realise I had to factor caffeine in too! 

 

I had no idea at the start whether the guys would be veggie, vegan, or super health conscious so did buy a bright green lime and wheatgrass smoothie that I ended up drinking as ‘feck that’ was the response when it was offered, and @Nickfromwales called it Kermit in a blender :D

 

 

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22 minutes ago, newhome said:

 

I don’t drink any soft drinks generally as I would rather drink plain water. I had no idea there were so many different types of coke so by the time I’d passed the peach, vanilla, cherry and zero cokes to get to diet (as requested!) I didn’t realise I had to factor caffeine in too! 

 

I had no idea at the start whether the guys would be veggie, vegan, or super health conscious so did buy a bright green lime and wheatgrass smoothie that I ended up drinking as ‘feck that’ was the response when it was offered, and @Nickfromwales called it Kermit in a blender :D

 

 

 

You’re probably lucky they did not raid your stocks of the medicinal coke.

 

Is not Kermit in a Blender the red one, if I recall my tasteless schoolyard jokes correctly?

 

What is green and goes red at the touch of a button?

Edited by Ferdinand
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Looks like a brilliant job all round, everybody learned something and @newhome can move on. To top it all given the Solar Thermal temp the sun must be shinning there, which just tells you that the sun does shine on the righteous, well some of them anyway. It is all somewhat tinged with sadness (not) by the fact that this thread will sort of slow down now and @Onoff's 'boxing in' thread will remain supreme, now at 55 pages I see. One might speculate if 'boxing in' will ever be overtaken for pages and while the job ain't finished it will continue to grow, for this thread we could look to use different metric and say that it has shown the measure of THE forum and didn't need, or take, 55 pages. Well done all.

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3 hours ago, PeterW said:

Solar thermal is up to 33c already ... 

 

127c now. 

 

I’m still not totally sure how it works :ph34r:. So the column is 127c, the silver Wilo pump on the Deltasol is 58c, the Discal air vent (I think it is) is 30c, the little eBay stat on the lower half of the tank shows 56.5 and the bottom cylinder stat is set to 45. So what determines how much heat goes into the TS from the ST and how does it get there? :S

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Edited by newhome
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Looks like the collector has stagnated at 127 deg C because the ST pump has turned off, and the ST pump has probably turned off because the stat has turned it off.  My guess is that the stat that's set to 45 deg C may be the one that is controlling the ST, in which case it's satisfied, as the bottom of the tank is well over the 45 deg set point.

 

It's not unusual to see pretty high collector temperatures in the ST system when it's turned off.  Between 120 deg C and 140 deg C is about the normal max range in this condition, IIRC.

 

When the experts have returned and recovered they will, I'm sure, be able to confirm or otherwise if this is the case. 

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I would have thought that you could pump in ST until you reach a temperature that the thermal store cannot cope with.  It is free energy after all.

So maybe a small bit of tinkering needed there.

 

As for drinks, when I was looking to move down here I would leave work early, drive the 4+ hours down and look at houses.  To keep me alert I started drinking Tesco "K" stimulant drink.

It comes in 1 litre bottles, costs about 80p and, after 2 litres on the way home, annoyed the hell out my now Ex G/F as I told her all about my day.

And I could get up for work at 6AM the next day.

It is just brilliant.  Don't make me wee like coffee does either, so all the goodness is kept inside :D

Edited by SteamyTea
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44 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

It is just brilliant.  Don't make me wee like coffee does either, so all the goodness is kept inside :D

 

Hmm, my take on that would be that all of the toxic additives are being KEPT inside! Better out than in and all that! 

 

 

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