[Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Basically the radiator in my room has not been working for days now (The UK being in a "cold snap" at the mo). Thus I am very cold in my room at night, and the letting agent employs morons to fix the problem. A guy turns up from the "Prefered" letting agent`s list of operatives for the 3rd time; messes around in the bathroom with the heating system; no look at my radiator by the way, and pisses off.

So GD, does anyone here know anything about radiators? The gas heating system works fine. The radiator bleeds ok. No heat on the hot water pipe side of the radiator. The radiator has worked before with no hot or cold areas. I wonder if there is a problem with the regulator valve, or a blockage somewhere? (air or gunk). Is there something simple I can do in this situation that you ppls know about to get the radiator working again? Good ideas welcome; apart from calling the letting agent again, or slashing my wrists.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Call me an amateur, but is it likely to be a blockage if it bleeds okay?
Is it the only radiator not heating?

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Yes it is recently. That`s a good point about the blockage. Could the prob be about how the hot water moves around the system. Maybe a builder installed the system rather than a registered engineer. The boiler seems not up to the job for a house this size.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

could be your pump

(I have no idea what I'm talking about, just that when I had something similar, that's what needed replacing) :)

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

is your bedroom upstairs? is the boiler? could be a number of problems tbh... your best bet may be to phone a couple of plumbers and ask if they do free quotes and tell them what the problem is, see what they suggest for free, then write (dont phone) and keep a copy of the letter to your letting agent, they have a responsibility to keep the house in good working order and whereas a phone call can be ignored they generally take notice of something if its written

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

I'm not as concerned about your heating problems as you are, since it's pretty warm where I am.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Lucky you. A dense fog has now engulfed the street where I live.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Buy a blanket.

That's how I coped with my radiators at university not working, anyway.

Blankets also have the added advantage that you can use them instead of a quilt during the summer when it's really hot.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

I've got a very similar problem, except my radiator next to my bed isn't hot as the heating isn't turned on.

I have no idea how to turn it on, and Chris is asleep :(

Two quilts!


On a side note, Chris made a pass at me in the pub last night :/

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

My cottage has no central heating :(

I sleep under 3 quilts and 4 blankets.

I find getting out of bed in the morning a very challenging argument, particularly given my stone floors ...

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

-3 and counting outside :/

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Do you live in a cave?

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

a 17th century thatched cottage in a village without a gas supply.

a cave might be warmer :)

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Nasty.

Ive been having my radiator going all day in my room, so its nice n warm now!

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

see

you are new to this posting lark. so i will give advice rather than criticism.

how can posting about how toastie warm you are, when i have posted to say that i am freezing my nuts off (2 jumpers + one cardie). how can posting that make me like you?

surely you must know that all you are doing is pushing my face in it?

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

I've only stayed in a place once where they had radiators for heating, and I don't see why people bother. They seem terribilty innefficient at actually radiating the heat.

In order of preference:

Gas heaters: Extremly cheap & efficiant to run (though I geuss that depends what your utility charges for gas). It takes ours not more than 5-10 minutes to warm the entire house, the heat they produce is clean & oderless.

Wood fire heater: Also relatively cheap & efficiant to run, performance comparible to that of the gas heater. Downsides can be availability of wood or at the least having to chop it up yourself. Not a clean burning fire source, requires maintenance of the flu & fireplace.

Keroscene heater: Takes a little while to warm the house, but once it gets going relatively good. Emits a terrible odor, especially if you allow it to run out of fuel. Odor can be reduced by use of camphor blocks. Pain in the bum to refill.

Electric bar based heater: Takes a while to warm up, costly to run. Once heated is a very efficient radiator and will warm a house easily.

Reverse Cycle AIr-con: Incredibly costly to run, we wound up with a $1000 electricity bill one month. Not terribly efficient at warming a room yet lone the house, but this tends to depend on the size of the system installed.

Electric fan heater: Extremely costly to run. Heats up very fast but heat is localised to anything directly in front of the heater. Heated air is very dry so can become too much if used for extended periods (dries out skin causes rashes/burning).

Electric/oil based radiator: Takes a very long time to heat up, not a very efficient radiator. Heat tends to be localised to about 1 metre radius.

Water based/central heating radiator: Water is preheated so not so long to warm up, but also does not appear to be a very efficient carrier of heat. I suspect much is lost on the journey to the radiator and in heating up the radiator elements/fins, very poor at distributing heat. Even with my body pressed against the radiator I still felt cold.



So.. basedon the above and since you do not have a readily available gas supply Yahwe I would recommend you getting some sort of wood fire based system installed.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

djbass just remind us all where it is that you live.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Gas central heating using radiators is the most efficient way of heating the vast majority of dwellings. This is simply a fact.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

I have my window up, my ceiling fan on, my Air conditioner set to about 55 and about 3 comforters on my bed. I'm nice and 'toasty'.

Do you like me now?

WELL, DO YOU????

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Alice Springs where temperature ranges can be as high as 40 degrees C to as low as -4 degrees C.

Easy to say if youve never tried any different.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Easy to say if your job involves looking every bloody day at heating types in eleven thousand different properties (ranging from solid fuel fires, room gas heaters, electric storage heaters, gas warm air heaters, communal heating, central heating, etc) and being forced to work out the annual anticipated running costs (and carbon emissions) per dwelling for statutory reasons.

Easy to say if you're involved in trying to work out how to best spend a heating budget of £1.5m in order to reduce running costs (and carbon emissions) among some very vulnerable groups.

Seriously, a modern condensing boiler linked to a distributed system of radiators is pretty much > anything else you can mention - for the majority of dwellings. My reasons for this belief isn't just that I personally happen to prefer radiators or something.

However, I should have said in my original post that my comments apply to the United Kingdom. It maybe that house building methods in Australia mean that the above is not necessarily true. Flats for instance, heat differently to houses (for obvious enough reasons) and I suppose the style of antipodean houses is probably pretty different to British houses.

The impact of insulation is enormously important here too - the flat I spent much of my childhood in was basically a council flat, and at one point in the 90's they fitted external cladding which was uberinsulated. The property after that almost never got cold.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

I had this problem in Uni (actually i think during some winter nights they just plain turned the radiator off the bastards)


Keep complaining and try to get it fixed but seriously just go out and spend 10-20 quid on an electric blow heater thing. It will keep the room warm when you sleep. Infact it can get it so hot you will sweat in bed and then wonder if you've had an accident when you wake up (!)

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

This is true of all heating types I guess but I always found electric blow heaters dry the air out pretty horribly.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

If it'll make you happier i'm freezing my balls off at the moment. :(

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

I love my eletric fan heater for warming my feet when I'm cold.

In halls at uni, I broke my heater so it was ON all the time (the temperature control thing came off, it was impossible to keep the water-intake-limiter down to stop hot water filling it all the time). In the summer term. I was pretty gutted, but always warm.

Re radiators only heating the area nearest them: while they're called radiators, they're actually convectors and work better with low ceiling places. They heat the air around them, which rises, and leads to hot air circulation in the room.

Yahwe, we live in a village with no gas, but we just have a big oil tank to power our boiler instead. Next year we're getting an oil aga, instead of our coal one (we've run out of the coal that was present when be bought the house). We've also managed to carpet most of the floors now :) (when I say "we", I mean my parents more than me...)
anyway ours is a 1750's farm house. It's a B grade listed building so we have no double glazing - you can feel the cold air coming through the sash windows. My uni house is similar in that it isn't double glazed and about as old, also with high ceilings. My "heater" in my room is more my computer than the heater - every other room in the house is freezing, mine is always warmer than everyone elses. That's also because I close my doors and keep my curtains pulled most of the time :)

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

i've just had a warning that our gas supply is going to be cut off.
The landlady is meant to be paying it but we've just had about 8 bills come through the letterbox that were obviously delivered to the wrong flat.
We live in the basement flat, and the addresses on the bills were "flat A", "bottom flat" and "flat A bottom flat". I have no idea whether we are flat A or not...
One has my old housemates name on it. one has my landlady's name on it. There are 3 different "customer reference" numbers, some date to before I even move in and the prices range from £30 to £300.

This is bloody confusing :( and my landlady is on holiday now...

The only consolation is you can guarantee that they won't be able to decide which gas meter is ours and so will probably turn off one of the other flats or something...

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

That sounds really ****ed, tbh. Get in contact with them, and explain the situation. Maybe that'll help.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

maybe...
I tried but the phones are off on sundays. And I'm at work from 8am tomorrow so it'll have to wait til tomorrow evening.
We've tried sorting this a few times by phone but it doesn't seem to have done much good.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Turn off everyone else's radiators in the house - it might be some blockage or pressure problem which might be helped by this. Either way you'll at least know that no-one else is any warmer.

It was -5 in Birmingham at 5:30 this morning and it's only November :(

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

Why does that matter? At 5:30am on a Sunday, everyone should legally be either mortally drunk, in hospital or asleep.

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

I had to walk home for half an hour in the middle of the night while mortally stoned last night.

it was cold :(

Re: [Boring]Radiator heating problem.
 

I'll take your word for it. Maybe for a large complex that has to share heating. For a single house though I disagree, the same amount of gas consumed in heating the water could directly heat a house much more efficiently.

As for the buldings construction tht's probably also a good point, I know it is vogue in a lot of places to have plasterboard or simularly empty cavity style walls. Most of the housing around here are constructed of double brick walls and I believe it's standard practice for all the housing to have thick insulated bats in the ceilings, we're pretty well insulted in general, infact I believe the houses have been constructed to meet cyclone proof standards, despite the fact that we are so far inland that by the time a cyclone ever made it to us it'd be little more than a cool breeze.

Consequently.. I'm freezing my balls off as we speak, perhaps I should turn the air-conditioner off :D