gurgling

[Anonymous]

Help! I get woken up every morning by really noisy gurgling in the bedroom radiator of our small flat. Bleeding it doesn't help. The system is old, and we recently had the system chemically flushed by our plumber.

Would replacing this raditator solve the problem? Our bedroom wall slopes outwards at about 60 degrees to the floor, and the raditator is hung at this angle. Is this part of the problem? If we replaced it with a low double radiator would that do the trick? The room is 3m x 3m.

Thanks
Nielsen

 

[Anonymous]

It is probably air in the system. You need to find a competent technician who can find out how the air is getting into the system and alter the arrangement of the cold feed & open vent pipes (I assumed it's a open vented system because it's old). Is it an old boiler, or could it be adapted to a sealed system?

You need to find where the air is getting in, because it will be corroding the radiators internally.

> we recently had the system chemically flushed by our plumber.

Check that he neutralised the flushing chemicals and added inhibitors. Check the pH of the water with litmus paper, it should be >7, ideally 8 or 9.

>Would replacing this raditator solve the problem?
No, probably not.

>Our bedroom wall slopes outwards at about 60 degrees to the floor, and the raditator is hung at this angle. Is this part of the problem?
No.

If we replaced it with a low double radiator would that do the trick?

No, don't waste your money.

 

[Anonymous]

Aiden, I remember reading that bleeding radiators should be done with the pump not running... or was it with the pump running? Dire consequences were meant to happen from doing it the wrong way round and I now can't recall which! Can you enlighten?

 

[Anonymous]

Switch pump OFF before bleeding.

 

[Anonymous]

True.

It shouldn't make much difference if the pump is correctly installed. The pump should increase the system pressure so that the air is expelled more quickly.

However, if the pump is not installed correctly, it can generate a sub-atmospheric pressure on the return connections, or at the highest-level radiators, when it is running. In this case, trying to bleed the high-level radiators would cause air to be sucked into the air vent. This, or something similar, might be the problem with Nielsen's system. Sadly there are a lot of heating systems with such problems.