Day 999: Some rad work

The long term plan is to get the new flooring down. However .. and this is a big one. Once the new flooring goes down, it's never coming back up ever again. Few things in life are permanent .. but this is definitely one of them.

And what that means is that all the stuff under the floor needs to be tended to. This includes plumbing for the central heating, insulation, network cables, pipe lagging, rotten floor joists. SPOILER ALERT - these will be all subjects of future posts. 

But in this post, I'm going to go over the installation of a new rad. 

So first, the materials. I went on a big ol' trip to ScrewFix and filled up the car with as much plumbing materials that I could fit. This included:

• 3m x 15mm copper pipe
• Fittings - straight, corners and T's
• Push fit end caps - to close off the bits I'm not working on
• Thermostatic valves
• A new single skin radiator for the hallway
• A garden hose and some clamps for draining down the system

Below you'll see the old vs the new. The old was ...well old and not the most efficient. It was however thin which was nice. The new is wider, smaller and much much more efficient in radiating heat. The different size meant that the piping would all have to be moved but that was by intent. Otherwise it wouldn't have been as much fun.

The rad that I bought came with all the fixings and mounting except for the valves.

But first, before doing anything, I had to drain down the system. There are a lot of good YouTube clips on how to do this. My favorite is from PlumberParts here (James is a legend). I don't expect this blog to be nearly as entertaining .. but hey you're reading it anyway.

The drain valve (that I knew about) was installed in the kitchen rad so we can easily run a hose outside. Blue garden hose was fine for this purpose as the system would not be under pressure when we drained it down. The hose was clamped down with a jubilee clip (note the towel to catch the drips). 

 

The other end was run outside into the gully. 

Once the water started to come out, I went round all the upstairs rads to open them up and let more air in and keep the water flowing. The fastest way of doing this is to connect up a wet vac and suck it out. I just let gravity do all the work for me and had a coffee while it was coming out. BTW - this took about 45 minutes so it was a nice long coffee.

 

So then I put all the supplied fittings on the new rad. I used a little plumbers mate to make sure everything was water tight.

Next came the thermostatic valves which will allow us to control the temperature of the hallway rad now. This is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly because it will allow us to fine tune the radiator to whatever level we want and allow us to fully isolate the rad if need be. But more importantly, the house thermostat is right next to this rad. We found last year that when the heating was on, the house thermostat got warm too quickly and the heating was switched off too soon. This made some of the other rooms consistently cold. Yes, we could have just moved the thermostat but that would have been too easy.

Then came my least favourite part .. the pesky rad tails. If you've read my post "Scott vs the radiator", you'll know why.

But luckily, this old DIY'er has learned from his past mistakes and now know how to tackle even the meanest of radiators. Out came the Loctite 55 - I swear by this stuff. Wrapping the threads about 8 times against the direction of tightening and I knew it would be OK.

After this, some majic happened and voila .. the rad was installed on the wall and piped into place. The magic really wasn't magic .. but you'll find that out as you read some future posts. But until then you can admire the rad rad.