Alvechurch owners

[FrigateCaptain]

Beware, a stove may not solve all your problems! Ours keeps the lounge/saloon nice and hot, the kitchen warm and the bedroom hardly benefits! (Mind you, the stove is at the front of the boat and the bedroom at the rear).

 

I wouldn't totally rule out the Alde/radiators and think you need to do some more investigations. Could the non working radiators be heated by the engine and not the Alde?

 

Have you tried tracing the plumbing circuit? Can you loosen the connections on the non-working rads and see if water is coming out. There may not be what you may call conventional valves on them but are there the smaller "valves" usually found at the other end of a domestic radiator? If these (small) valves are closed then the radiator won't heat.

 

 

Yeah checked all that, rads have no on/off valves on them, bled all but one ant the stern(no bleed valve).

Engine not requiered for heating system, only domestic. we will be fitting a back boiler stove for central heating and removing alde but need it working now.

 

Gonna ring abc........

[Ray]

Just had a thought about the absence of valves on your radiators - how are they connected to the pipework?

 

When we first fired up our central heating (which is powered by an Alde) the rad nearest the boiler was red hot, the next a bit warmer and the two after that stone cold. All the valves - one at each end of the radiators - were fully open. The hot water was simply passing through the first radiator with no impediment to restrict it and was returning to the boiler. The subsequent rads never got a look in.

 

We had to almost totally close down the Lockshield valve on the first rad to get the hot water to flow further round the circuit. The valve on the second was closed down a little less and the valve on the third less still before the fourth radiator got really warm.

 

A lot depends on how your rads are connected to the pipework. You may just need to replace a plain connector with a lockshield valve to improve the situation. Unfortunately, you'll probably have to drain the system to do so.

[Semitrad]

Hey, just thought it'd be a good idea to have a Ex-ABC hire thread so we can help each other with any probs that might arise.

 

I'll start off........

 

Our alde heater is'nt heating all the radiators on the boat, the header tank is full, the pumps working fine and i've bled all the radiators but

Still we have only hot ratiators in the center bedroom, and the two bathrooms (the closest ones to the heater)

 

Any ideas as to what the problem might be?

 

 

So the boiler is heating the water, the pump is pumping the water through radiators in series, what could possibly stop the rads getting hot?

 

Restricted flow.

[Evo]

Do those with ex Alvechurch boats rename them...????? I have very fond memories of an Alvechurch boat called Bonellis Eagle. We hired it for a week years ago for our very first boat trip...its was a superb week doing the Stourport ring....at the time the rebuild of our own boat was getting us down so we hired one for an enthusiasm top up. It certainly did the trick.

[Graham and Jo]

Do those with ex Alvechurch boats rename them...????? I have very fond memories of an Alvechurch boat called Bonellis Eagle. We hired it for a week years ago for our very first boat trip...its was a superb week doing the Stourport ring....at the time the rebuild of our own boat was getting us down so we hired one for an enthusiasm top up. It certainly did the trick.

We had intended to rename ours but when we found out that a Dotterel is a rather stupid bird it just seemed to fit so we left it.

 

Back to the original subject, I traced our circuit and it goes:-

 

From the boiler into a junction one branch to the calorifier the other to the rads.

 

The branch to the rads has a stop cock on to switch it off in the summer - is it fully open?

 

The branch to the calorifier has another valve to reduce the flow through the calorifier and therefore encourage flow through the rads. It is quite hidden up under the gunwhale. You could try shutting this completely as an experiment and then open bit by bit.

 

The rads circuit goes under the rear steps and has a rad in parallel with the main pipe. This one has a shut off valve and we have found that it should only be opened a little otherwise tons of heat vanishes into the back cabin.

 

The circuit then goes down the boat to the middle cabin straight through a fin rad with no valves.

 

Next stop is the front loo with a small fin rad with no valves

 

Through the kitchen and up to the front, across the front and then back down straight through the lounge fin rad with no valves.

 

There is then a rad in the corridor next to the front loo, this is in parallel with the main pipe and can be switched off with a valve.

 

Through the middle cabin with out stopping and into back loo with a small fin rad - no valves.

 

Into the back bedroom, through a fin rad with on valves back to a junction where the return from the calorifier joins and then into the pump and into the boiler.

 

So the front is the 4th rad. I would have thought if your system is like our then any hot rads suggests it is working but perhaps the flow is too low, a low flow could cause the boiler to switch off prematurely and perhaps lose what heat there is in the early rads.

 

We have to run it on 5 to get anything like a decent amount of heat out. 3 will keep the chill off while we are out.

 

Even on 5 the front rad is just not big enough to heat the lounge and Midland chandlers quote them at .57Kw per metre and ours is around 1.5 m

 

The system is not designed for winter I think and is expensive on gas.

 

We are looking at putting a stove in the front.

 

 

Cheers Graham

[RLWP]

Just had a thought about the absence of valves on your radiators - how are they connected to the pipework?

 

<snip>

 

Ours are daisy-chained. A pipe comes out of one radiator and goes straight into the next one. Out of that into the next and so on. So all of the water flows through all of the radiators. It isn't clever but it does work.

 

Richard

 

As long as the pump works OK of course

[ditchcrawler]

Ours are daisy-chained. A pipe comes out of one radiator and goes straight into the next one. Out of that into the next and so on. So all of the water flows through all of the radiators. It isn't clever but it does work.

 

Richard

 

As long as the pump works OK of course

and of course if ONE valve gets closed it all stops, which could be the problemfor the OP or may be a plug of ice.

[RLWP]

and of course if ONE valve gets closed it all stops, which could be the problemfor the OP or may be a plug of ice.

 

 

Sorry, I wasn't clear. There are no valves. The pipe goes out of one radiator and into the next via fittings screwed into the end of the rad.

 

Richard

[Graham and Jo]

Sorry, I wasn't clear. There are no valves. The pipe goes out of one radiator and into the next via fittings screwed into the end of the rad.

 

Richard

That is just like ours except for 2 radiators that are plumbed with a valve and a bypass pipe. So you cannot switch the circuit off except by the one isolation valve at the start which kills all the rads.

 

Graham

[Ray]

The OP says that "Still we have only hot radiators in the center bedroom, and the two bathrooms (the closest ones to the heater)".

 

To me this seems as though the boat is probably plumbed differently from Dotterel as the implication is that there must be a circuit to allow the hot water to return to the boiler after the hot rads.

 

I can understand how the finrads don't have valves - I presume water just flows through them as it does through an ordinary pipe. Consequently, I'd start looking for some kind of junction/valve combination somewhere between the front most hot radiator and the nearest cold radiator/finrad on the same side of the boat.

 

Without such a junction/valve (which may have been turned off by a hirer who didn't want heat at the front of the boat), I can't see how the water that has heated the "working" radiators can get back to the boiler to complete the circuit and allow the hot water to move around.

[FrigateCaptain]

The OP says that "Still we have only hot radiators in the center bedroom, and the two bathrooms (the closest ones to the heater)".

 

To me this seems as though the boat is probably plumbed differently from Dotterel as the implication is that there must be a circuit to allow the hot water to return to the boiler after the hot rads.

 

I can understand how the finrads don't have valves - I presume water just flows through them as it does through an ordinary pipe. Consequently, I'd start looking for some kind of junction/valve combination somewhere between the front most hot radiator and the nearest cold radiator/finrad on the same side of the boat.

 

Without such a junction/valve (which may have been turned off by a hirer who didn't want heat at the front of the boat), I can't see how the water that has heated the "working" radiators can get back to the boiler to complete the circuit and allow the hot water to move around.

 

 

I've flushed the system a few times, bleed the radiators, made sure that the calo/iso valve is set properly ect ect.

Have given up, building the harth next week for the stove and then alde removal followed by replumbing the entire system in 22mm for the back boiler,

 

other than that, getting a old waste paper basket to put under a mushroom vent and burn stuff in lol