Wiring up a motorised valve

For most homeowners one look inside a central heating wiring centre is enough to convince them to get the professionals in, which is a shame because the most common failures in a central heating system are the pump and the motorised valves and these are both wired back to this complicated, spaghetti like, mass of wires.

Fortunately, things are getting easier. For pumps it was never that difficult, they only have 3 wires: live, neutral, earth and if you can’t manage 3 wires you really have to ask yourself if you should be doing this at all. That said, only good can come from keeping people away from the wiring centre, so these days the cable on most pumps comes with a kettle-like connector that can just be detached and plugged in to the new pump, the proviso being that you replace like-for-like.

For motorised valves, especially 3-port valves, it is a bit more intimidating. A 3-port valve has 5 wires: Neutral (blue), Earth (yellow and green), Hot Water Off (grey), Central Heating On (white) and Switched Live Out (orange). 

Fortunately, the number of wires and their colours is pretty much a standard across the industry so you can replace a 3-port or 2-port valve from one manufacturer with the valve from another manufacturer and not have to change any of the wiring in the wiring centre. On the downside, the cable supplied with the valve is usually directly wired into it and can’t be easily swapped over and if it does come with a plug the odds are that plug will only fit a valve supplied by the same manufacturer. As a result, you generally did have to replace the wiring at the wiring centre. This wasn't exactly rocket science as you just had to find the blue wire from the old valve and replace it with the blue wire from the new valve etc. But it was always fiddly work with plenty of opportunity for error.

Fortunately, there is a cheap and easy way of getting around this in the shape of Regin’s 5-way connector. It's a very simple idea, rather than take the old cable out of the wiring centre you just cut it off and fit a plug to the end of it. You then fit another plug to the cable on your new valve, push the 2 plugs together and hey presto. Not only does this make wiring up a motorised valve relatively straightforward but the connectors themselves are fairly cheap at about £6, although I'd be surprised if i they cost more than 30p to make.

To use these connectors just follow these simple steps:

Step 1

Cut the cable on the 3-port valve you are replacing (having ensured that the electricity to the central heating system has been completely switched off, that you’ve tested for this using a multimeter, and that the 3 amp fuse is currently safe and warm in your pocket)

Step 2

You should now have a loose bit of cable connected at one end to the wiring centre. Use a craft knife or a wire stripper to trim back the outer cable covering and expose the 5 wires within. Use your wire stripper to remove about 5 mm of the insulation from the end of each wire and use your fingers to twist the individual strands of copper for each wire together.

Step 3

Take one side of the 5-way connector and have a close look. You can see that each connector is numbered 1 to 3 with the centre connector being labelled as the earth and the connector next to it marked N for neutral. It doesn’t really matter where you put the other 3 wires, the only thing that matters is that you use the same number for the same colour wire on both sides of the connection. So if you put the orange wire into number 1 on one side of the connector then you must put the orange wire into number 1 for the other side.

Step 4

Having wired up our loose cable we can now wire the cable that comes with the new 3 port adapter into the other side of the connector.

Step 5

Just to be certain, push the 2 connectors together and check that the same colour wires are joining up. Note that the colours can vary a little, one might be dark blue another might be light blue, but hue and tone aside the basic colours should match up. When you’re sure, fit the cover over the connector and use the 2 screws provided to secure the cable in place. Repeat this for the other side of the connector.

Step 6

With the covers on, push the 2 connectors together. They are shaped so that they can only fit together one way. Now switch on the electricity and Bob should be your uncle

Tap Troubles

The humble box spanner

There was a time when if you wanted to fit a basin or bath tap you would dig out your standard half inch or three-quarter inch box spanner and tighten or remove the tap's back-nut with little or no bother. Alas, it would appear that those days are gone!

There's been a spate of taps entering the UK market recently that are no longer supplied with what I would call a standard back-nut. It's almost impossible to see if you are going to have an issue from just looking at the nut but when you try to tighten it using a standard tap box spanner it doesn't fit! I guess this could be a manufacturing error but it seems to be so commonplace that I'm assuming they are now using some metric version of the back-nut, a version that is exactly too big to work with the old Imperial box spanner.

The most annoying aspect of this is that not only do they not tell you this when you buy the tap but, because they are so similar in size, you don't get to realise there is an issue until you're stuck underneath the bath trying tighten up your new taps and failing dismally. It wouldn't be so bad if there was an alternative tool to use but, aside from a basin spanner, which is awkward to use at the best of times, there isn't. Occasionally you might be able to get by using an adjustable spanner but more often than not that's just not possible.

I dare say you be able to buy a new metric box spanner for these new taps in the not too distant future but for now it's just plain old-fashioned annoying, although you should be able to get around it by retaining the old back-nuts from the taps you've just taken off, so don't throw anything away until the new taps are on nice and tight.

Latest Updates

Chrome

 Change seems to happen all at once or not at all in the plumbing world. Since the 1st Edition of the "Home Plumbing" manual not a great deal has changed. Ok, my prediction that the drain cock with a spherical valve rather than a washer would take off did not come to fruition, in fact it seems to have trudged off to a dark corner and quietly died a death.

So what has actually changed in the last few years? Well, for me at least, the two big advances have been the introduction of 'Layflat' pipe and connectors that mean that Chrome wastes are no longer the stuff of nightmares.

LayFlat Pipework

'Layflat' is not an apt description of the product, rather it is a marketing statement stuffed full of wishful thinking. An apt description of the product would run something along the lines of "Far less likely to take your eye out as it whips back into a coil" but I guess they'd have to sell it in bigger coils if they were going to get all that on the side of the box, so 'Layflat' it is.

The big advantage of plastic is that you can thread it through holes in the centre of your joists. As a result, your pipework is well away from errant hammers and nails, the joist isn't weakened anywhere near as much as it would have been if you'd notched it, and  you can avoid having umpteen joints in your pipework, which is always going to be a weak spot no matter how good your soldering.

Even better is that you can buy plastic pipework in really long coils, so that you can avoid joints all together if you need to. The downside of these coils was that, once coiled, the pipework was very reluctant to uncoil. This was a pain if you wanted to thread it through 3m of joists, a real pain for 5m and an absolute agony for really long runs.

I'm fairly sure that it was John Guest that first came out with this new type of plastic pipe but most of the plastic pipe companies seem to have a similar offering these days. I recently discovered a coil of the old pipework at the back of our lock-up and I'd forgotten just how awkward it was to use, especially if you're working on your own, compared to the new stuff.

I think they have now stopped selling the old pipework, so all plastic pipework - certainly that sold by John Guest - is this new 'Layflat' pipe, a change for which you should be eternally grateful.

Chrome Fittings

Solvent-weld to chrome, nicely done

In the manual I mentioned that chrome is a complete pain to work with. This isn't because it's very poor at transporting water and waste - although it's not the greatest. It's a pain because it never used to fit anything else very well.

The whole point of Chrome is that it looks nice so, if you are going to use it, you need the end result to look nice and shiny and neat. The problem was that sooner rather than later you needed to change from chrome to plastic pipework and that was never, ever, a nice, shiny or neat change.

You really only had two options: fit the chrome into plastic push-fit pipework or use a compression connector.

The problem with using plastic push-fit is that it's not really designed for this diameter of pipe and, whilst chrome pushes-into push-fit fittings easily enough, it also pulls back out again with little or no encouragement. This is bad enough when you can see the problem but when you hide the push-fit behind stud walls and under floorboards you are just asking for trouble.

Compression fittings aren't much better because they are huge and ugly and, once again, the chrome pipework can be pulled out again fairly easily - because the chrome pipework is slightly narrower and because chrome is pretty slippy stuff.

To add to the frustration, what you wanted your chrome pipework to join to - solvent-weld plastic - it obstinately refused to do so.

The end result was that I avoided Chrome pipework like the plague. Sadly, whilst the Black Death hasn't darkened my doorstep since the 1600's, Chrome keeps cropping up all the bloody time and has to be dealt with.

Fortunately those lovely people at McAlpine have come to the rescue with a series of fittings designed specifically for chrome waste pipework. This includes general chrome fittings, designed specifically for Chrome Waste pipework, lengths of chrome pipe itself and, most importantly of all, adaptors to take you from chrome to solvent weld neatly and easily.

I can sleep well at night once more :)

Thanks for the reviews

Haynes Home Plumbing Manual

I’d just like to take advantage of the New Year celebrations to offer a large ‘thank you’ to all 29 people who have taken the time to log onto Amazon’s site and give my manual a rating, especially the 22 of you who gave it a 5 star.

Despite being a fairly eager reviewer myself I am pretty sceptical of these reviews, for the simple reason that they seem very easy to fake. So it was with some surprise that I discovered that I’d never even heard of the vast majority of my reviewers – yes one or two at the beginning were from friends, but then, at the beginning, they were the only people buying the damn thing. Since then I can say with hand on heart that I haven’t a bloody clue who these people are, although they are clearly wonderful examples of humanity with fine taste and sparkling intellect.

One of the best reviews for the manual is also the lowest star rating (3), which I think works quite well. Apparently she thought the manual was excellent but felt that I might make lots of money out of it and put plumbers out of business. Sadly, she is very wrong!

One of the many myths about writing is that you’ll make lots of money from it and sure enough some authors do seem to be doing very, very, well. Alas, this isn’t typical. In fact I’d go far as to say that taking up the pen in order to live a life of vast wealth and fame is like serving chicken at KFC because you’ve heard that there are people in the fast-food industry who are making millions.

Of course I was blissfully unaware of these financial limitations when my manual first came out. Ok, I wasn’t naive enough to think that people would be queuing up outside Waterstones at midnight, dressed as plumbers – aside from myself - but I did think that the manual would sell far better than it has.

Much of this was down to Amazon’s ranking system. By all accounts there are 6.5 million books available from Amazon, so when I saw that my manual was in the top 10,000 I naturally assumed that I was onto a winner. After all, if I was coming 10,000^th in a Marathon that involved 6.5 million competitors, I’d be pretty chuffed.

Sadly, it doesn’t quite work like that. For starters most people who enter a marathon are fairly fit and have a reasonable expectation of finishing the race. The same cannot be said of many of the books offered by Amazon. To continue the analogy, many are well into their dotage, with a hacking cough, high blood pressure and a nasty limp. At least 4 million of them don’t even own a set of trainers and a couple of million are not even aware that there is a race going on, in other words, of those 6.5 million books only about 100,000 are actually being bought with any kind of regularity. At this point, whilst being ranked at 10,000^th isn’t bad, it becomes clear that a lap of honour is unlikely and that medals are going to be in pretty short supply.

All in all, as a working plumber I probably make more money clearing blocked toilets during the year than I do from writing about them, which is a bit of a shame as writing is far easier on the old knees and, as a career, is almost effluent free.

On the plus side many of my own dreams have been realised; I have a published book! Ok, it involves slightly fewer buxom maidens and far more close coupled toilets than I’d originally imagined my first book would contain but at least I can say I am a published author. It also regularly outsells “A Tale of Two Cities” and Wilbur Smiths “When a Lion Feeds” and I must admit that I never thought I’d be able to say that. Ok, there is a rather large caveat here; it regularly outsells them on Amazon’s UK site. I dare say that whilst a large number of people in Japan and Brazil might be tempted to buy “When a Lion Feeds” (one of the all time favourite books from my childhood) few, if any, are going to pick up a book on UK plumbing – which I feel is a sad indictment of modern society... well maybe not.

So, once again, thanks to all those people who have bought the book and enjoyed it enough to go on-line and rate it. For those people who are merely thinking of buying the book, go for it! Don’t for one second think that the vast wealth that I’ll accrue as a result of your purchase will go to my head, cos it won’t... although I may be able to afford a bag of crisps to go with my Friday night beer down at the local, albeit not a big bag. 

Big Boss

The Big Boss

In the manual I touched briefly on the wonder of “bosses” - no not that annoying dip-stick that keeps on giving you hassle even while he’s paying your salary but the fitting used to connect pipes of different sizes to each other which, in order to encourage confusion, is also called ‘a boss’.

The most common sort of ‘boss’ that you’ll come across is the ‘strap-on-boss’ - which sounds like a sex toy but isn’t. The main problems with these are that the hole you need to cut rarely seems to conform to the standard sizes in most hole cutting kits, the strap itself is awkward to fit at the best of times and nigh on impossible to fit on every other occasion and if everything is less than perfect they have a habit of leaking.

The only reason they have a strap is to draw the boss onto the main pipe whilst the glue dries. So when you think about it there have got to be alternative approaches, yes? Well there are but most use some sort of rubber bung that you expand and they tend to be more expensive and rarely as good.

Fortunately there is now a better alternative, the “Big Boss”.

At first sight this just looks like a strap-on-boss that they’ve forgotten to put the strap on, then you notice the little flexible teeth on the inside. It’s these teeth that perform the job of the now passé ‘strap’.

To fit them just follow these simple steps:

• Cut the hole, the size of which they have conveniently set to match the holes cut by most hole-cutting kits.
• Get rid of any swarf and give the hole a little chamfer using either a round file or a utility knife.
• Add your glue to the boss and the pipe.
• Push the boss into place. The teeth put up a bit of resistance at first then they slide into the hole and snap open again, holding the boss firmly in place whilst the glue sets.

Not only do they seem easier to fit but they’re less prone to damage when stored in your van and are actually a little cheaper! The only downside I can see is that you might struggle to apply sufficient pressure whilst teetering on a ladder but, so far at least, I haven’t heard a bad word said about them.

You can buy them on EBay or just pop to your local plumbing merchants – PTS definitely sells them. The manufacturer, Rodetal, seems to shun the internet but they do have a blog to keep us all updated on developments as more and more sizes and colours become available.

Sauter Detach Motorised Valves

Detach 3-port valve

In a traditional central heating system - where you have a boiler and a hot water cylinder i.e. not a Combi boiler - the boiler itself has no idea what it is heating. All it knows is that cool water comes into it and - with luck - hot water leaves. Where that hot water goes is none of its concern.

The same cannot be said for the homeowner, who is often very concerned as to where all that fully-paid-for hot water is going, so most CH systems will have within them one or more ‘motorised valves’. These are usually hidden in the airing cupboard next to the hot water cylinder and they control what gets hot; the radiators, the hot water cylinder, or both.

To perform this vital function they contain a number of moving parts and the sad thing about moving parts, especially ones constantly immersed in water, is that sooner or later they give up the ghost and expire, usually in the dead of winter when they are needed most. As such they are one of the most frequently replaced parts of a central heating system.

We went through the process of how to replace these valves within the Haynes Home Plumbing Manual but at the time I had never heard of the “Detach” motorised valves by Sauter, possibly because they weren’t sold in the UK at the time. This was a shame because they seem to be very good valves that offer real benefits to plumbers and DIY enthusiasts alike.

First off they come with a detachable lead. This doesn’t sound like much but it’s the wiring that is often the most daunting aspect of replacing one of these valves. Quite why, in the vast decades that motorised valves have been around, no one else had ever thought of inventing a lead that could just be unplugged is one of life’s great mysteries, but fortunately Sauter did make that breakthrough and life is now just that little bit easier as a result.

Of course this is of little help if you’re putting a Sauter valve in for the first time but at least any subsequent repairs and replacements will be considerably easier.

Another nice point is the easy-to-detach head. This is where the actual motor – often called an actuator – resides and it is often this part that dies well before the main valve. As such it’s very handy if this can be removed quickly and easily. Fortunately most manufacturers offer this feature these days - Honeywell being the notable exception. 

Bizarrely, the Sauter valve doesn’t just rely on a nice simple button to remove the valve but insists that you remove a small screw first. This seems unnecessarily inconvenient bearing in mind that these valves are usually set in fairly cramped conditions, but there you are.

Finally, this is one of the few valves that actually tells you what it’s doing. Rather than listening for the sound of the motor, or trying to catch a glimpse of the lever arm moving this valve has a two lovely little lights, one labelled CH and the other HW. Again, a really simple improvement that was somehow beyond the wit of every other manufacturer.

To put the icing on the cake, they are also pretty well priced and rumour has it that they are looking to develop heads that will fit onto other manufacturers valve bodies, so you can get all the benefits of the Sauter Detach without the hassle of replacing the old valve completely.

All in all a very welcome product.

Magnaclean Professional 2

If you like money and hate a cold house one of the best things you can buy is a Magnaclean. 

It’s just a magnet fitted into the CH system – usually just before the boiler – and it removes all the magnetic debris from the water as it flows around the radiators and pipework. Since almost all of the debris in a central heating system either starts off magnetic or soon becomes mixed in with magnetic ‘stuff’ this means it takes almost all the gunk out of the system. As a result your boiler works better and lasts longer, your radiators generate more heat for less energy and your wallet can relax and take you out to the pub to celebrate.

The magnetic approach to cleaning a central heating system was so efficient and so simple that everyone got in on the act and slowly but surely the Magnaclean lost ground in terms of features, ease of use, ease of fitting etc.

Fortunately Adey are not the sort of company to sit around bemoaning their fate and so was born the Magnaclean Professional 2, which addresses all of the problems of the earlier version:

• It is a piece of cake to fit, so much easier than the original, with far fewer parts to cause trouble. 

• It’s got a drain off at the base now so you can drain down the contents, making it much easier to use as a dosing point for Inhibitor chemicals.

• The older version could only be accessed by taking the lid off, meaning that you had to have quite a bit of clearance above the unit to service it. Bearing in mind that boilers are often crammed into tiny little kitchen cupboards these days, this was not a good idea. The new version solves this problem by using a push-fit mechanism to hold the unit onto its isolation valves. By simply loosening a screw you can now quickly detach the unit altogether, take it out of its tiny cupboard and service it at your leisure. So you now need very little clearance above and below the unit.

All in all it’s a much improved product and we’re fitting loads of them, partly because they are so good and partly because we’re trying to win a new van J

Macerators

You were the only one!

I’ve just been proofreading the manual – bit late now but what the hell – and noticed that I completely failed to mention macerators.

When you fit a new bathroom getting the hot and cold water into the new room is usually pretty straight forward. What can be far more complicated is getting the waste water out again. This shouldn’t be a surprise but it often is.

The problem of course is straightforward; the hot and cold water comes into the room under pressure, so you can take the pipework pretty much any route you feel like. The waste, on the other hand, leaves the room via the wonder of gravity and as such has pretty limited options, all revolving around the word “downhill”. If you’re trying to convert a basement room into a bathroom this can make the entire project a non starter... or does it?

Well you could opt to pump the waste away via what is generally referred to as a “macerator”. This is effectively a blender linked to a pump. The waste runs down from the toilet, washbasin, shower or kitchen sink into the macerator. Here it is ‘blended’ in a fashion that is best not looked into too closely and then pumped via much smaller pipework (Usually 22mm) up to the main waste system. Most macerators can lift the waste about 5m high, which is usually more than enough to connect to the main waste stack and let gravity take over once again.

So what are the downsides of this? Well the main one is that all macerators rely on everyone in the household being vaguely sensible and as such they don’t work well around children. From the moment they’re born they cause trouble, many mothers can’t fight the urge to dispose of baby wipes down the toilet, an act that will bugger up the best of macerators within a few short weeks, and once the child can walk they find the toilet a magical place where things just disappear in an exciting roar of water; bracelets, scarves, Tigger, Postman Pat, the list is endless. Granted most children can block the most robust of toilets if they set their mind to it but the poor old macerator generally doesn’t stand a chance. This rule, of course, also applies to the kitchen sink; you have to be very carefully with what you flush down the plug hole.

All that said, if you are careful they will work perfectly for years and if your child is hell bent on flushing away the family jewels you can at least retrieve them from a macerator - although they may be a little damaged and you might not be that keen on wearing them around your neck for a while at least.

The only other downsides are that they make a bit of a noise when they operate, although they are getting quieter all the time, and, as you can imagine, they are not the most pleasant things to repair if and when things do go wrong.

A number of different companies do macerators but the leader in the field is Saniflo and you can find out more about them at their website.

The Plumb Tub

Plumb Tub

The aptly named Plumb Tub is, in case you hadn’t already guessed, a tub for plumbing. It’s not the sort of product that’s going to revolutionise the plumbing world but it is the sort of cheap, durable and easy to use knick-knack that is well worth having in your arsenal of plumbing tools.

It’s just a nice little bowl of soft, rubberised plastic that can fit neatly under a radiator. At each corner is a hole that is cunning sized to accept the sort of pipework that you’ll normally come across in a domestic plumbing system, namely 10,15 and 22mm. Just ease the appropriate corner of rubberised plastic around the pipe and relax as any wayward drips and leaks are directed into the bowl.

Ok, the bowl isn’t the biggest so you might want to have a water vacuum pump nearby just in case the leak proves to be bigger than expected. It also doesn’t do 8mm pipework, or at least it’s not mentioned in the literature, which is a shame as a worrying amount of CH systems were plumbed in using 8mm pipework. That said, it's a perfectly handy pot for putting all your bits and bobs in after the job and it only costs a few quid, so why not give it a try anyway.

Errors

I'm rather hoping that this will be a very short blog posting. Alas, there are bound to be some errors in the manual and as I find those that aren't just grammatical I'll list them here. These will all be fixed in the manual in subsequent editions.

If you find any errors yourself feel free to let me know either by adding a comment to this post or by sending me an email to andy@a1perfectplumbing.co.uk

Page 20 Thermal store

The diagram on this page shows two cylinders, a standard vented cylinder on the left and a thermal store on the right. Sadly the title of the "Standard Vented cylinder" actual reads "Standard Unvented cylinder". Oops!

Omissions

There are bound to be things that I either forgot to mention in the manual or just didn’t have the time and space to talk about in any detail. As I spot them I’ll mention them here in this single blog posting. 

If you find any yourself feel free to write a comment here or email me and I’ll write up something to cover that topic.

Page 19 “Unvented hot-water cylinder”

The combination valve

I talk here about finding the tap that turns off just your high pressure hot water. What I didn’t mention is that this tap often turns off some or all your cold water as well.

Why would it do that? Well mixer showers, for example, work best if the hot and cold water enter the shower valve at exactly the same pressure. In a high pressure system this is usually the case anyway but it isn’t guaranteed. For example, the maximum pressure of the hot water is restricted - usually to 3 bar – whilst the cold water is left to roam wide and free to hit whatever pressure it feels like. It's unlikely that your cold water would routinely be over 3 bar, but it’s not unheard of and in this situation your mixer showers would start to act up as they try to deal with hot and cold water at different pressures.

To prevent this happening the cold water for all the showers is often taken off from the combination valve attached to your hot water cylinder. This valve is where the pressure reduction of the hot water takes place and as such now ensures that both hot and cold water are at exactly the same pressure.

From a homeowners point of view this is no big deal but the fact that I didn’t mention this might cause some confusion.

Page 76 "Replacing the washer on the stop tap"
In step 5 you need to be supporting the stop tap with either a set of pump pliers or an adjustable spanner before you start trying to loosen off the head otherwise you risk damaging the pipework entering and leaving the tap. I guess this is common sense really, but worth while mentioning just in case common sense isn't all that common after all :)

The Kopex Pipesight

So Mr Bond...

Very occasionally a new plumbing tool comes out and you think “Wow! Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?” Slightly more often a new tool comes out and you think “Well... Maybe...Not bad, I guess!” and then there are the tools for which the only real response is “Eh?”

I’m still not sure what category I’d put the Pipesight into. It’s role in life is to let you accurately drill holes for radiator pipework. The idea is that you fit your new radiator and attach the Pipesight to the base of the radiator valves. As if by magic, a laser light now bursts forth and illuminates the floorboards below, showing you exactly where you need to drill the holes in order to connect up your pipework.

Do you really need a laser to tell you this? Personally, I use a short piece of copper cut so that it just fits into the valve and touches the floorboard. I then draw around the base of the copper pipe and drill accordingly. It’s all very dull and very low-tech but it also has the virtues of being effect and cheap... but it’s not a laser!

And maybe that’s the point? I suspect that the people who will buy this tool will buy it just because it does have the high tech, hint of the James Bond about it. They will be the kind of people who, when confronted by Mr Bond, will scorn the idea of just shooting the bugger and will instead opt for tying him to a bench, aiming a high powered laser at his privates and then departing the scene with a clever witticism. Sadly we all know that this doesn’t work; James Bond will escape, shag the baddies missus and then, when they inevitably meet again, forgo the clever stuff and just shoot the baddie in the head.

Is there a moral in this tale? Well if there is I can’t see it. If you like the high tech stuff give the Pipesight a try, after all it is quick and easy to use and the cost isn’t going to break the bank. The laser doesn’t actually burn through the floorboard - which is a crying shame as I’d definitely buy one if it did - but the mark it gives you is going to be more accurate than drawing around a piece of pipe.

Pump your mains cold water

Boost your mains cold water with a Homeboost

One of the golden rules of plumbing is “thou shalt not pump mains cold water”. I’ll grant you that it’s not the most exciting of rules but it’s an important one... or at least it was.

So what’s happened to consign this rule to the history books? Well Salamander have just brought out the “Homeboost”, a pump specifically designed to overcome poor mains water pressure.

So how come this can work on the mains? Well the water regs never actually said you couldn’t pumps mains water, they just added enough caveats to ensure they always put people off the idea. For instance, the pump would have to ensure that it never delivered more than 12 litres of water a minute, regardless of the mains water pressure. It also had to ensure that there could be no backflow of water back into the mains. For some reason it’s taken until now for someone to design a pump that meets these criteria.

So why would I want to boost my mains water pressure? Well, if you find yourself asking that question the answer is that you almost certainly don’t need to boost your mains cold water. Most homes in the UK tend to get water entering the house at between 2-3 bar pressure. However, the water supply companies only have to guarantee water to your property boundary at 1bar, which is about 10 litres of water per minute. If the pipe taking this water from your boundary into your home is old and knackered you may well experience water pressure far below this nominal 1 bar.

Here in Lincolnshire poor water pressure can be a real problem. Whilst we do have towns and the occasional city the vast majority of Lincolnshire is composed of villages. Some of these could be described as residing in ‘The sticks’, some are most certainly in “The back of beyond” and a few are very much beyond the back of beyond, turn right, cross the ford and take the path signposted ‘Godknowswhere’. News takes its time reaching these places, water can take an absolute age, and by the time is does arrive it’s often under as much pressure as a stoned Hippy lying on a tropical beach.

Ordinarily you get around this by pumping stored water but this requires large storage tanks, which isn’t always feasible and won’t help at all if the homeowner wants a nice new shiny combi boiler. And it’s combi boilers that will probably benefit from this new pump the most.

So what are the downsides? Well it’s not a cheap pump, with an RRP of £358.80 inc VAT! Apparently it makes less noise than a boiling kettle (46dB) but do you want to hear a kettle boiling all day? And of course it’s going to be using electricity the whole time, so you’ll see an increase in those bills.

That said it’s probably still cheaper than the alternatives, which were either large storage tanks and whole-house pumps – more expensive, just as noisy and still using electricity – or digging up your water supply pipe and replacing it with a bigger diameter pipe and hoping that that sorted the problem, which can be very expensive and often doesn’t really work.

To be honest if I had low water pressure my only concern would be Salamander themselves. We always found them to make great pumps at a great price but, in our experience, they have a terrible customer support team  - we had one customer told she’d have to accompany the Salamander engineer to the ATM so she could pay him, as he wasn’t leaving without payment! Which was bad enough but the bloody pump he’d been called out to look at was faulty. Sadly he was either too incompetent to work this out for himself or under a lot of corporate pressure to earn his keep.... Either way, we ended up with a very upset customer and so we avoid Salamander these days - although we might be tempted to give this pump a try.

La-Co Cool Gel

To my mind “proper” plumbing uses copper tube. I’ve nothing against plastic pipework - it’s terrific stuff for quickly laying the backbone of CH systems - but it’s best hidden from view where the white, floppy, pipework and the large, knobbly, fittings can’t offend the eye.

Of course there are a few rather large problems with the alternative, copper tubing. Most of these revolve around the fact that it’s best soldered, which in turn requires a modicum of skill and risks burning down your home. Reducing your home to smouldering rubble is known within the plumbing trade as “a bad thing”... and so the heat mat was invented.

In the bad old days I suspect that heat mats were made of asbestos and lasted a life time – partly because they killed you early. These days they may be safer but they have the life expectancy of a Mayfly with a chesty cough, mainly because they can’t cope with direct heat. 

This is a real same because more often than not the time you really need a heat mat is when you have no choice but to aim your blowtorch directly at a flammable surface.

However there is an alternative to the heat mat, which is a spray on gel called “La-Co Cool Gel” which I’m fairly certain I failed to mention in the book - It’s only writing this up now  that I’ve realised it’s not called LL Cool Gel. Which is a shame as that is what I always ask for.

Cool Gel is known as a heat barrier spray and from what I can make out it’s basically water made firm by holding it in gel form.. and it’s superb! I wouldn’t spray into on carpets and the like – although it would probably work - but, aside from that it can be used everywhere else you might want to use a heat mat.

It’s also very handy if you have to heat up a pipe that is very close to a valve. The valves themselves often contain rubber washers which melt or deform when heated. To prevent this just spray the pipe with the cool gel between the valve and where you’re heating. The heat now travels as far at the gel where it is miraculously stopped in its tracks, preserving the valve whilst you solder your joint.

Alas, it’s not cheap but it is well worth the investment as it’s still considerably cheaper than a new home.

Bristan Easyfit

Bristan Easyfit Taps

Fitting taps is not technically difficult but the locations you have to wriggle into and under can turn what should be a simple job into a bit of a nightmare. 

As I mentioned in the Home plumbing manual, throwing away the copper pipes that come with most taps and fitting flexible tap connectors can make things much easier but it's still the kind of job that most plumbers try to avoid because it's such a pain. However, help may be on its way in the form of the new range of Bristan Easyfit taps.

Basically the tap now comes in two parts. You fit the base, which comes with flexible connectors and isolation valves, and then, when you've finished the tiling and applied your sealant lines, you fit the tap onto this base!

We had a play around with this last year up at Bristan’s offices. Yes, there were a few issues at the time but the fact that they'd made a point of asking installers to try them out and give them feedback is in itself a wonderfully sane approach to plumbing design - although sadly not one that seems to have caught on much within the industry.

Of course the main benefit of a two part tap comes later on when you need to update it or just give it a good clean. Instead of having to burrow under the basin or bath for a sweaty and frustrating half hour you can just isolate the water supply and then remove the tap body from the top and fit the new one into place. What could be simpler?

Yes, you’d have to replace the old Bristan tap with a new Bristan tap, but I can think of many more traumatic things in life.

All in all they are well worth having a look at - in fact to have a look click here: tapfittingchampionships

------- update -----

Over the last few yeas we've come across a number of customers who have had problems with these taps, mainly because the grub screw that holds the tap in place fails, the tap blows off and a deluge ensues. I have to assume that Bristan are sorting this out - more than 1 grub screw and some sort of locking mechanism would seem sensible - but I don't know for sure. With this in mind you might just want to check the grub screw every 6 months or so and just give it a little tweak to keep it in place.

hep20

Within the Haynes Home Plumbing manual I discussed at some length the pro’s and con’s of the various push-fit piping systems. 

Personally I avoid plastic pipework where I can for no other reason than I think copper looks better and is cheaper to work with – the pipes are about the same price but copper fittings are no where near the price of their plastic counterparts. That said, for the DIYer plastic piping is a Godsend.

At the time of writing Wavin had two products on offer; their old traditional Hep20 product, which could be recognised by its uninspiring battleship grey colour and the fact that you couldn’t get the fitting off with any ease once you’d managed to get it on, and their new product, which they were calling “In4Sure”.

Well a few weeks ago I popped into the local plumbing merchants to find them putting all the old grey hep20 fittings into bags for return to Wavin. It seems that two things have happened, firstly that the old grey system has been recalled and secondly that the chaps at Wavin are keen Startrek fans - In4Sure is now being heralded as the “The Next Generation hep20”. You can still find it called In4Sure but I suspect this name will be quietly dropped over the coming years to make way for “Hep20 Voyager”, and “Hep20 deep space 9”.

To be honest this is a well overdue move. The old hep20 wasn’t a patch on most of its rivals, whereas In4Sure contains a number of sound innovations that bounce it right back up there.

In terms of use nothing has changed from what I said in the book, although there are a few things that bear repetition: the pipework is nominally the same size as the competitor products (mainly Speed-fit) but it has a slightly smaller inside diameter, which means that a speed-fit pipe strengthener (or insert) can only be used if you’ve brought a hammer along for the job. In other words you can mix and match the fittings and pipes but always try to use a hep20 pipe insert for hep20 pipework and a speed-fit insert for its pipework. The other benefit of Hep20 is that the pipe itself seems far more flexible than that of its competitors, which can be very useful if you are trying to thread it through joists.

Kibosh

Put the kibosh on it.

In the Haynes Home Plumbing Manual I talked about dealing with burst pipes and suggested a clamp repair kit as a fairly useful piece of kit to keep in the home (p39). Well Rothenberger have recently brought out a neat little adaptation to this called the "Kibosh".

The principle remains the same - you open it up, place it over the leak and then clamp it shut. Of course it's only a temporary fix but it gives you time to draw breath and decide how to effect a permanent repair.

The design means that it should be relatively easy to get it onto most pipework and it's small and neat enough to rest unnoticed in kitchen drawers for years at a time without cluttering up the place.

The current Kibosh is only designed to repair 15mm pipework, which means that for the next few months  only your 22mm pipework will be prone to spontaneous bursting - for such is the law of Sod. However, different sizes will be out soon.

The 15mm version costs about £12 - when I asked at PTS they said that was the RRP so you ought to be able to beat them down a bit - but to fully cover yourself you're going to need a version for every pipe size in your home, which could make it an expensive business.

Another thing that worried me when I first saw it was that it was so small. If a pipe bursts because it froze, the ice usually causes the pipe to swell up a bit for at least 5cm on either side of the actual fracture. Can the Kibosh cope with this? Well, frankly I haven't a clue but I'd be surprised if they hadn't already considered this.

To be honest it looks a really well thought through design that's well worth buying for that rainy, floody, day.

Word of warning though - don't wait until you have a flood before reading how to use the Kibosh, have a practice first.

You can find more details at: Kibosh pipe repair

Green Deal training

We've just got some prices through for the training courses to be an Assessor for the Green Deal. Are you sitting down?

• Two day course £1490
• Five day course £2450

The exam is multiple choice and to make sure you really know what you're up to they give you unlimited, instantaneous, attempts.

This is the thing I hate about these grant things - vastly over inflated training fees and a training structure designed to ensure that a monkey could pass.

Result? Poor assessing, very rich training companies!

The Green Deal

The Green Deal

This autumn (provisionally October 2012) sees the arrival of the long awaited ‘Green Deal’, a mechanism whereby we are all going to be encouraged to insulate our homes to the max - Which is of course a great idea.

By all accounts UK homes are amongst the worst insulated buildings in Europe. I guess this is hardly surprising; for all our moaning we have astonishingly benign weather and until recently were surrounded by seas filled with oil and natural gas. Alas, all good things come to an end, and as our own stocks of fossil fuel have dwindled away the price of heating our homes has gently rocketed through the ceiling, so much so that these days only a fool would fail to insulate.

So what exactly is this ‘Green Deal’? Well, to the government at least, it is a work of wonder. Why? Because, to the mandarins of Whitehall, the perfect grant will offer as much encouragement as possible whilst, ideally, spending little or no money.

With the Green Deal the government actually gets to spend nothing, because it’s not really a grant at all - you don’t actually get any money from anyone. Not a penny!

So what the hell is it? Well, I guess you could call it the “Green Bank Loan”.

How it works is as follows: 

• Firstly, somebody either knocks on your door, or you – eager to embrace green ideals – ring a partner company in the Green Deal.

• An Assessor, who has been trained for days in the black art of energy efficiency, will now appear on your doorstep and conduct a survey of your home.

• The survey complete, they will then make a series of recommendations, all of which are covered by one single caveat, or ‘golden-rule’ – the cost of the energy efficiency measures they recommend must generate more savings than they actually cost.

• Astonished and amazed by these potential saving you say yes to the proposed measures and before you can say ‘carbon footprint’ the work begins.

So who pays for all this work? Well, you do – or at least the person who pays the utility bill for that home does. The idea is that the cost of the new insulation will be added onto your utility bill but – and here’s the clever bit – because that bill has gone down as a result of all this new insulation the overall cost should remain the same, or actually be slightly less.

Because the work was designed to improve that particular home the cost of paying for the work stays with that home i.e. if you sell up the new owner will get a utility bill with the remaining cost of the insulation still built into the bill.

To be honest I think it sounds like a great idea. Yes, I can see all sorts of potential pitfalls, not least of which is this energy saving v cost equation and the number of different parties involved – the assessor, the insulation seller, the installer, the energy company, the bank covering the loan. With that many people involved it could all go pear-shaped in no time at all - and I assume that’s why it’s taken so long to get everything rolling.

That said, if you have an old home with solid external walls, this could be a real boon as it would cover the cost of getting external wall insulation fitted without the hassle of arranging a bank loan.

All we have to do now is wait until the Autumn!

This blog is designed to accompany the Haynes Home Plumbing Manual written by Andy Blackwell.

It would be great if no one found any errors or omissions in the manual. It would also be great if I suddenly shot up to 6ft 4 and sprouted long, flowing, locks. Sadly, these two widely disparate events share one common theme – they are both very, very, unlikely to happen - to say the least. So, when an error is spotted I’ll list it here.

The manual also included a fairly extensive chapter on alternative fuels and green technologies, an area that develops at an astonishing pace. As I hear of new grants and developments I’ll be posting them here as an accompaniment to the book.

Whilst the rest of the plumbing sector might not be quite as frantic as the green/alternative fuel arena it’s certainly not static – in fact some would suggest that it just can’t stand still at the moment - so I will be continuing the blogs I wrote for yell.com and maintaining a running commentary on general plumbing news and interesting tools and developments. Rather than clog up this blog I’ll be posting this general plumbing news to Plumbforyourlife.