Glow-Worm Fuelsaver 55F, No gas, fan or spark

[WackyRaces]

I'm just wondering if anyone can help with a problem with my 19 year Glow-Worm Fuelsaver 55F boiler. It has to be said this has been an exceptionally reliable system and the only maintenance in 13 years of living here has been to have one circulation pump for the hot water system replaced.

Anyhow the problem today came in two stages:-

Stage 1 - Was that at 10am this morning I discovered a fast drip, drip of water out of the bottom of a very small single panel radiator in my equally small bathroom and that radiator mainly serves as a heater for a tower rail that is hung over it. It was hard to tell if this leak was from the radiator or the valve (the valve entry is at the bottom on the left) but there was a small area of the radiator with paint bubbling on it in the bottom left and when I pressed this lightly there was a kind of hissing sound and it felt as though it was possibly giving way. Obviously I stopped pressing at that point.

So I turned off both the radiator inlet valve and the outlet valve and after that the heating system ran as normal for the next six or seven hours and the leak in the radiator slowed to almost nothing (probably just the remaining water in the radiator dripping through the now presumably contracted crack).

Stage 2 - I was in my kitchen around 6pm and the hot water circuit was also now running (I have an advanced Honeywell room stat that changes the room temp setting six times per day so leave the Honeywell programmer for the heating circuit on the boiler set at Constant and the Hot Water on Twice and the Hot Water runs for 45 minutes twice per day, which seems to be enough as I am a single person household) and the boiler was alight with a blue flame but there was also now an alarming slosh, slosh, sloshing sound coming from the boiler that I had not heard before.

So concerned about this and whether it was connected with the closed valves on the very small bathroom radiator (which is right next to the hot water cylinder and hot water header tanks and central heating header tank above this) I turned the boiler off at the Honeywell controller. After this I turned the controller back on but when I turned the hot water circuit back on the boiler did not light. Then I went and turned up my room thermostat to create demand on the heating circuit still there was no fan, no spark and no blue flame. Instead there is just the sound of the heating and/or hot water circuits moving water around caused by the pump running.

I have a feeling that the two events are in some way related although I can't think why as surely it should have been fine for me to isolate the small radiator by turning off the valves at either end of it? Or should I have only turned off the inlet valve and left the outflow valve open? I have had one of the large living room radiators fully off for several weeks per year when a Christmas tree is in the room and it has never caused a problem.

So has closing down the valves in the small radiator with the leak in it in some way overloaded the pressure in the heating system (the sloshing sound possibly further aggravated for some reason when the hot water circuit was also operating several hours later) or does this all sound like a complete coincidence and that it is a separate failure in the boiler within a few hours of spotting the radiator leak.

Does anyone have any suggestions about the likely cause of the problem in view of the above sequence of events.

For anyone in the trade interested in this job this is in far southern Surrey and a few miles west of Gatwick.

 

[newbie1]

firstly isolating the rad would not have caused any problems at all so thats out of the equation
somehow by turning the circuit on and off you have caused a problem
it is not likely to be diagnosed over the internet
not really that close to you as am in staines near heathrow
but as a first step i would try and bleed air out of the system
second try the old reboot of all appliance it sometimes works
3rd you need an engineer if you get desperate give me a shout but its a long way so someone local will be cheaper i would have to charge 100.00 to look because of distance
07872 931643 paul

 

[wards]

would recommend as newbie1 said,have you tried resetting the overheat stat?
si

 

[WackyRaces]

would recommend as newbie1 said,have you tried resetting the overheat stat?

Can you possibly explain to me how do I do that and where I am likely to find the overheating stat? Its starting to get cold here now, even though being in a flat with heating out in the common hallway and the neighbours above still running their heating its not nearly as bad as it could be in a detached house.

In the kitchen I just have the Glow-Worm boiler and the Honeywell slider switch 7 day controller underneath it. All of the rest of the heating and hot water system is in the cupboard in the bathroom that also contains the hot water cylinder and hot and cold water tanks (its a ground floor 2 bed flat conversion done in 1991 and they didn't fit a pressurised cylinder system but just normal hot and cold tanks and a shower pump to provide decent pressure on the hot water in the kitchen and all the hot and cold water taps in the bathroom) and various pumps, valves and other control related devices. The central heating heading tank sits in a small loft above all of that lot.

Basically both the hot water and heating circuits were running and the blue flame in the boiler was showing as normal but there were some nasty sounds of water sloshing or moving oddly around in the boiler as though it was under some kind of strain or high pressure. Could the radiator leak some how have contributed to that?

So I shut the boiler off with the slider switch on the Honeywell programmer (the normal method) and did not turn it off with the temperature dial on the Glow-worm boiler (which to be honest I have never ever used to turn off the boiler before messing around with it since this break down to see if it would get things going) and waited a couple of minutes. When I then turned it back on at the Honeywell programmer the pump ran as normal but the boiler just acts dead and there is no fan, no gas and no spark.

All ideas gratefully received before proceeding to calling someone out and signing up to at least £100 repair cost and probably a great deal more.

EDIT:- I have turned off the power to the boiler and removed the top and bottom covers but I can't see any sign of the overheat reset switch, even though it is shown in the Glow-worm diagram inside the bottom cover.

I assume I would have to start disassembling the whole burner unit to get anywhere near that and I doubt that is safe for somebody not suitably qualified or trained like myself to do.

FURTHER EDIT - PROBLEM SOLVED - I finally worked out which was the overheat stat reset button and the boiler is now on fine and working normally, although I have only risked using the central heating circuit so far as it was the hot water circuit that was causing the strange sloshing sounds before it then wouldn't re-start when I turned it off.

The reset button was a small red plastic plunger on the bottom of the left hand side of the unit below the bottom slide off cover. The Glow-Worm diagram looks nothing like the actual item involved, although the location in the boiler is basically the same.

Many thanks to all those who responded for your assistance.

I'm still not really sure how I tripped the overheat reset switch after 13 years of using this boiler and never doing so.

May be it has to do with turning it off completely when it was running at its hottest and most stressed so that heat continued to escalate inside the boiler as it was at peak temeparature but the total shut off meant no cooler water was any longer being pumped through it.

Anyone here want to suggest how much replacing a small single panel radiator about 18 inches by 12 inches in size might cost including all the labour and any drain down work on the system that might be required. I'm pretty sure the rad has corroded through in one spot due to having damp towels resting on it for all these years.