I love it when a plan comes together
To start with this weekend was a double header, it was one of those weekends when I took an extra day due my overtime on a Monday evening. So twice the time to get things done, two days of work and one day with Izzi.
I reckoned I had two major outstanding jobs and if I only got one of these completed then it was a good weekend. Basically the jobs were having the Laddomat fitted and getting my car sorted out. Although these jobs were not to be completed by my own fair, gnarly hands, they were things I’d had to organise and they were jobs that had taken over a month each to get completed.
The Laddomat had been sat in its box since it was ordered, I’d done a bit of texting and organising of plumbers but no-one had seemed interested. One plumber had responded with “I’ve been working as a plumber for 40 odd years now and I’ve never heard of a Laddomat” a typical patronising response to a reasonable request, not really helpful, but fitting in with the “y’know that piece of s**t you bought” friendly school of plumbing I’d unfortunately experienced in the past. Anyway I’d mucked around enough, so I got in touch with Brian my recent wonderful plumber, I’d texted him at the start of the exercise and he’d not been in touch so I thought he wasn’t interested. So having failed elsewhere I decided on a more thorough campaign and after calling rather than texting I had Brian booked in for last Thursday.
My car too was booked in for a Friday surgery at Darlington Lookers, it had been a problem for ages now, the economy had suffered by 10mpg and what had started as one DPF warning light was now multiple dash warnings. This had come to a head on Wednesday when the car went into “limp home mode” and on the Thursday the following day it had repeated this process on an extra busy A66, not good it involved a visit to a lay-by and later joining the A66 traffic that was now nose to tail and doing 70mph. Not only was the fault making the car uneconomical, it was potentially hazardous to my car’s health and now it was dangerous. I needed it sorted and what with these extra problems I now considered that the previous diagnosis might now fall short of the mark in fixing my motor.
Anyway arriving home from a thoroughly nerve jangling journey on Thursday evening my first positive of the weekend would hopefully be finding the work completed and done by the plumber. I parked up and looking at the house it looked untouched by human hand, the doors were locked, the spare keys hadn’t been posted through the letterbox and a smattering of lights I’d left on in the morning were still burning. I entered with little in the way of expectations. I opened the door and there’s my stove burning away and on further inspection there’s a fully fitted Laddomat and a flu thermostat fitted to the chimney breast. Not a bad job at all. I phoned Brian and he was happy with the Laddomat, he’d not fitted one before but he’d tested it and observed it was a “clever little bit of kit”.
So one down….
The next morning and the car was booked into the garage for 8:30 in Darlington, I was still worried about the limping home mode so I got up early and headed off with plenty of time to spare. I kept it steady and apart from the DPF warning light I made it in plenty of time. I was prepared for the worse but an hour and a couple of coffees later, a chat with the lovely Amy and I was called to the service desk. My car was ready, washed, hoovered (it needed it) and most importantly fixed, the part they’d ordered had fettled it and all the warnings and problems had been resolved with this single part. They even knocked off eight quid to round the cost down to an even £120, not bad at all.
So that’s two down, now anything else is a bonus.
Bonus time began with a trip to Screwfix for a bundle of pipe insulation, some jointing compound, PTFE tape, cable ties and some insulation tape. After this a trip to B&Q for three more rolls of loft insulation and steel wool, then off to Simpsons for four bags of ovoids for the fire.
The car all the while working wonderfully.
Back in my house, a swift lunch was followed by some unplanned napping in a chair, well it had been a tough week and I had last night made the mistake of a bottle of wine and a Chinese to celebrate the Laddomat, so it all added up to some zzzzzs.
I spent the rest of the day lagging pipes in the floor I’d taken out, lagging pipes in the thermal store that had been exposed in the Laddomat installation and then testing out the Laddomat installation itself.
To test the Laddomat I sapped heat from the thermal store by putting the radiators on and switching off the oil-fired Worcester Bosch boiler. I got the store down from 60oC to 20oC and then I cleaned the fire out, lit it and waited for the flu thermostat to signal the Laddomat to switch on. Sure enough around 20 minutes into the burn the flu was up to 80oC and the Laddomat silently started up.
The system is really clever, the Laddomat circulates water from the stove back-boiler back to itself until the water gets nice and hot and then it releases this hot water to the thermal store. The Laddomat then takes a smidgen of the colder water from the store and mixes it to the circulating hot water, this is then sent to the stove for heating up, it’s not entirely cold so it keeps the temperatures up. Doing this the back-boiler is always hot and the fire operates at peak efficiency, also the water going into the back boiler is never cold so it means it doesn’t damage the stove with a sudden influx of cold water causing condensation. The Laddomat too operates a low speed pump, so the hot water going into the store doesn’t churn up the water as it heats it up from the top down.
I stayed up until 2am monitoring the system and it worked a treat. The circulating hot water from the Laddomat to the stove is piping hot making the fire hotter than ever. The old pump system would sap the heat from the immediate room to heat the cold water making it really inefficient and a pointless room heater. Even the next morning with the fire dying down after an overnight burn the pipes were still bouncing, so efficient was the circulation of hot water. The old pump system at this stage would have been circulating cold water from the back-boiler to the store, cooling it down and making for a pointless system. The Laddomat worked brilliantly.
The next day I reviewed the flooring I’d done the week before, it just wasn’t good enough, the insulation just wasn’t thick enough and the joint on the end just wasn’t straight enough, it had to be done again. Now this may all sound a tad unnecessary but it had been driving me mad and despite all the work and kneeling on the stuck up nail head it was all worth it in the end.
So two hours later, a bit of straighter sawing, a liberal double application of insulation and all was well in the flooring world.
Next a bit of woodwork on the radiator manifold, a couple of boards screwed in and a larger log of wood screwed home to attach the piping, not a bad start to the day.
After this I got on with prising up of bathroom floorboards in order to fit my first radiator. Now I know I may have been critical in the past regarding the unprofessional removal of floorboards by tradesmen but professionalism went out the window and an hour later, a brace of damaged floorboards and I was ready to lay down the plastic pipe to the radiator in front small bedroom. Anyway this was all to be replaced later.
Route sorted and I needed to tackle the radiator tails, the radiator valves and some troublesome chrome legs I’d bought for the radiators. I’d bought these new longer legs, to replace some shorter ones that were too short and had discovered on researching that chrome could be a sod to connect, so I approached the whole install with some trepidation.
Some internet research later and the tails were inserted with nicely applied PTFE tape, I’d roughed up the chrome legs with my groove joint pliers and inserted them with a liberal dash of jointing compound to the radiator valves and into some nice Conex compression fittings too (don’t use push-on connections with chrome or soldering for that matter too). A bit more work and drilling and the legs looked brilliant, perfectly straight and vertical, nicely nipped up to the joints with the whole assembly ready to drop into the neatly cut hole I’d made in the floorboarding.
Before I dropped the panel in, I decided to thoroughly test the joints so I put some wood beams over the hole and lowered the rather heavy radiator and attached board onto the supports. With this mass of ironwork hovering over its final resting place I connected up the now nicely routed plastic piping (with Speedfit pipe inserts) and nipped all the joints up tight to the Conex fittings. I inserted the flow meters into the manifold, attached the piping to the manifold, cocked the stop-cocks to open and nothing happened. A bit of tinkering and I found that the lockshield on the return rail of the manifold wasn’t open, so I twisted it to on and lots of bubbling and whistling (radiator bleed valve open) ensued and things started to happen. A minute or two later, the radiator was full, the header tank had refilled and I closed off the bleed valve and waited for it to heat up, but it didn’t.
Hours of tinkering later, much reading of documents on the internet, much gnashing of teeth – as most of the literature was in Italian – and I discovered the problem. Turns out that on the flow meter there’s a rather well hidden lockshield. This lockshield isn’t the big nut at the bottom nor is it the little flow adjust release at the top but a piece of anonymous black plastic between them that can be twisted to isolate the circuit or more interestingly twisted to open the circuit, I opened it and hey-presto my first radiator started to heat up.
IT’S ALIVE!
I love it when a plan comes together.
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Now this all might not sound like a hard day of work, but mix in washing up, tidying, putting floorboards back into place, swearing after cutting myself for the fiftieth time, making food, trying to recover a hard drive etc… and it took the entire day. Now next time I do this it won’t be a matter of two hours to open the lockshields it’ll be a minute, it won’t be an hour mucking around trying to get the joints right, it’ll be ten minutes. So a couple more experience stars in my exercise book and I’m now motoring on with all my jobs, the rest of the rad’s should be easy(er) and I might even have a bedroom or two up and running soon.
Just out of interest the wonderful plumber Brian showed up on Saturday, after I’d picked his brains on chrome joints I asked him for his true opinion of my system.
He remarked that he’s worked on smaller thermal stores in the past but my system though larger was brilliant and a great design.
It is though, radiators are now on individual separate circuits that can be centrally isolated or balanced. Also employing this design I have the luxury that all radiators come on at the same time, the system will also now take another solid fuel boiler or biomass boiler, it has inputs for wet solar and it has a spare fully configured rig for underfloor heating and it’s inherently so flexible that it’ll also store heat till you need it from all these sources. All of this controlled by a two zone Nest thermostat system that’s controllable over the internet and expandable to a multiple room zoning system should I wish to do it.
It’s f**king brilliant 🙂