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Central Heating advice please.


iain m

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We recently purchased a 40 year old house with original boiler and radiators. Last autumn the boiler was replaced with a Worcester/Bosch which was so efficient it on occasions blew hot water up the vent pipe into the expansion tank. The easiest way to remedy this was to convert to a non vented system and run at 1 x bar. this was fine last winter. During the summer I renewed all 15 radiators and cleaned out all the remaining sludge from ground floor pipe and fitted a filter. I estimate the volume of water in the system has now greatly reduced and radiators warm up very quickly as a result so very pleased. However now the warm up has improved the pipework is clicking and creaking when the boiler is almost reaching stat temperature 21c and when the system shuts down at night.

We have experienced this before I previous homes but not at this level. Should I be concerned? ( I checked our insurance which covers leaking pipes and damage!!!!!! ).      

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hi , i have had this for years plumber told me it was just the pipes expanding & contracting and not to worry.

it has never caused any problem.

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The only real cure is to put felt under the pipes where sit on the joists and that will cure it. I guess with the efficient boiler, it is drying out the floors which is making it more noisy over time. 

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Thanks Thrustyjust

I know its Paranoia, when I lifted several sections of boarding the joists had been cut away to take the pipe size but then insulated with hessian and were trapped under pressure, there was no way to increase the cutaway so fitted 4mm ply strips so when the boards were refitted they were no longer trapped which possibly has increased the expansion area. On the plus side I have set the boiler and alarm clocks to the same time and in the very cold months the creaking and groaning of the pipes is a secondary alarm!!  

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Could the new rads be contributing to the racket? The modern thin steel ones do tend to be bit prone to that.

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As everyone has mentioned its purely to do with the expansion of the pipes, copper as a material is extremely malleable so can withstand this change in shape regularly. It does work harden but given the very small amounts of expansion it would take an extremely long time before it became brittle and failed.

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Hi, I have spent many enjoyable days (not) tracking down ticking pipes, in fact there was even a thread about it

http://forum.wscc.co.uk/forum/topic/121018-epic-diy-fail/

What experience taught me was that the 'tick' or 'creak' very often isn't being caused where you think you can hear it coming from. 

If you can identify the actual pipe making the noise, make sure you check out all the places it changes direction. Very often that is where the rubbing happens and it's just that pipes seem to be very efficient at transmitting the noise.

Good luck on finding it, it was driving me mental...

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