wiresandmore
pfm Member
I wonder if any PFM’ers can advise me here.
We have had ongoing plumbing challenges for quite some time in our home. It’s a large semi-d; 3 storey and 6 bed/4 bath. We have a De Dietrich boiler using mains gas, it was expensive and is apparently suitably sized for the house (I think it’s 38kW), it’s coming up on 10 years old but still seems to work well. We also have a Hive system which splits the flows into three zones + HW.
Our challenge has always been that the zone valves seem to be at best partly effective. If the hot water is on, the ground floor heating comes on too (maybe not fully, but it significantly heats the ground floor). And, it’s hard to get the top floor to come on at all as it seems the ground floor valve never closes fully and therefore much of the heat escapes into that circuit.
The answer would seem to be to change the valves. But even when the valves have been replaced (which they have been more than once), the problems persisted, they’ve not gone away. I’ve asked the plumber to find some more resilient, stronger valves with better shutdown mechanisms so that the zones really work properly but he says they are all very similar and some of our problems are just due to the pressure in the system and some valve leakage is common. Frankly, I doubt that - but I am struggling with my searching on the net to find what would be demonstrably better than what we have (which are Myson valves, costing around 70-80EUR here in Ireland).
Anyone got any advice on this and what the best valves might be? Alternatively, can you get boilers with zones built-in (we’d need 3 + HW) and can a hive system be configured to support that. Which brands should I look at?
We have had ongoing plumbing challenges for quite some time in our home. It’s a large semi-d; 3 storey and 6 bed/4 bath. We have a De Dietrich boiler using mains gas, it was expensive and is apparently suitably sized for the house (I think it’s 38kW), it’s coming up on 10 years old but still seems to work well. We also have a Hive system which splits the flows into three zones + HW.
Our challenge has always been that the zone valves seem to be at best partly effective. If the hot water is on, the ground floor heating comes on too (maybe not fully, but it significantly heats the ground floor). And, it’s hard to get the top floor to come on at all as it seems the ground floor valve never closes fully and therefore much of the heat escapes into that circuit.
The answer would seem to be to change the valves. But even when the valves have been replaced (which they have been more than once), the problems persisted, they’ve not gone away. I’ve asked the plumber to find some more resilient, stronger valves with better shutdown mechanisms so that the zones really work properly but he says they are all very similar and some of our problems are just due to the pressure in the system and some valve leakage is common. Frankly, I doubt that - but I am struggling with my searching on the net to find what would be demonstrably better than what we have (which are Myson valves, costing around 70-80EUR here in Ireland).
Anyone got any advice on this and what the best valves might be? Alternatively, can you get boilers with zones built-in (we’d need 3 + HW) and can a hive system be configured to support that. Which brands should I look at?