My water boiler has been playing up for a while.
There are almost zero controls on it, only High - Off - Low and a reset button.
A single digit LCD display tells me what it’s doing from time to time.
H, c, t, A
Really useful and informative if I had the manual, which I don’t as I living in rented accomodation.
Recently it started displaying a flashing ‘F’ and after pressing the reset button ‘F’ went away and the boiler subsequently went about its business.
Until this morning when a flashing ‘3’ appeared and the little fella would heat no more. Fortunately there was enough hot water in the tank for me to do my abloutions.
So now I will get on to the letting agency to get this boiler repaired.
However, there is no guarantee that this will be fixed in the interim few days.
My hot water tank does have a dual immersion system (apparently), 2Kw on top, 3Kw down below.
The tank itself is 117 litres.
After a spot of maths using a useful formula I found on the t’internet the 3Kw should heat the water in approx 2.5 hours. (providing it actually works of course :dubious: )
I’m not a big fan of immersion as it costs the Earth.
However I have been googling like crazy to find how long a 117 litre hot water tank will stay at a reasonable temperature.
The tank is set to 55 degrees centigrade, if I use the immersion tonight and switch it off before I go to bed what is the likely temperature in the tank 7 hours later.
I’m loathe to leave the immersion on overnight just incase the thermo-limiter doesn’t trip when it should.
I suppose this is a very long winded question on the rate of heat loss from a hot water tank with personal woe included
Your heat loss will depend on how much insulation you have on the hot water tank and what condition it’s in.
Before I changed my boiler I often relied on the immersion heater because the previous one wasn’t particularly effective and with the boiler some distance from the tank the water was losing some heat on its travels. Using the immersion was much more efficient especially as you could use the timer to control it.
Personally I didn’t worry about a control failure on my immersion heater, but perhaps you’ve heard of problems with them?
With good insulation on the tank however it should retain enough hot water for your needs in the morning.
Have you tried finding the boiler name/model and looking on the internet for a manual to identify the error code?
I’ve googled aplenty for user manuals on the Potterton Envoy Heatsaver with no luck.
The user manuals I found for current Potterton models do not cover the error codes either. They do however highly publicise there “HeatTeam” service for boiler maintenance.
I put the immersion on at 9 and now (12) the water is piping hot.
I’ll recheck tomorrow at 8 AM when I get up, if needs be I smack it back on for an hour. I usually shower at 9.
I don’t have a lot of experience with this but both immersions I’ve used heat up a lot faster than 2.5 hours - more like 30 minutes, I think. Of course, that probably wasn’t from a ‘cold start’, as it were. I guess that, if the tank is insulated well enough, an hour or two a day (say just before you need hot water in the evening - it should then just be hot enough for your morning shower) should see you through OK. You can experiment with the timings yourself, of course.
