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Opel Fruit<P><BR>Opel Fruit, Dept. 53<P>

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Everything posted by Opel Fruit<P><BR>Opel Fruit, Dept. 53<P>

  1. The Boiler/Burner HAS to be set to work by a competent Chauffagiste. For your sake, your wallet's sake and for your Assurance' sake. It also has to have written evidence of an annual service by the same. There is usually a "Mise en Service" card left near the boiler, and also a Facture for the work as evidence. I gave some rough outlines of what this involved in my tome. But this is for "getting it going" or "WTF is wrong with it?". Oil burners are a bit temperamental, and the weather and oil grade and viscosity have a lot to do with reliable and stable firing, particularly if the burner is set up marginally, and of course safety and low emissions. You can plumb your own oil supply, again using recognised French-sourced material. By all means have a Chauffagiste check it - he should do anyway as part of the commissioning since he should be measuring pump depression to ensure the supply is airtight and flowing correctly. 
  2. Jeez... I work away for 6 months and the place goes to pot! Simple rules - if the fitting is the same in the UK - use it if you must. That means radiators (miles cheaper in France), 22/28mm pipe and fittings (slightly cheaper in France) and that's about it. Oil boilers are OK from anywhere in Europe, it's the burner that isn't - you CANNOT gaurantee that a jet change will suffice - the whole pump, air supply and gun are USUALLY set up for the fuel used in the country of sale..... Anyway, oil boilers and burners are 2/3 price of the UK in France. So why bother??? Somebody with a pressure gauge needs to set the burner to work, and adjust the air supply for CO2 and temperature at the flue. Or else.  TRVs sold in France are 16mm not 15mm. Guess what size pipe they're for?????? Use 18/16mm pipe for rad piping (yes 16mm at the rad end). Most of Screwfix's stuff is very Grade B.... unless branded. Lots of "Made in PRC" sh**e. Sorry, but if it ain't a make it's tat. Suck it and see. Everything else is in my thread. I think..! Next!
  3. Not sure why "Michael" refers to 'real' heating engineers.....in that manner - odd! Anyhow, oil boilers, as mentioned in my tome, should be serviced annually. It sounds like the injector is well worn, the pressure and air flow are "off" and that the whole thing needs a decoke. At least. I would seek the advice of a "real" chauffagiste, and at least get the thing looked at as a whole. The latest oil boilers are more fuel efficient, naturally, but unless you wish to change the whole thing, a good boiler clean and perhaps a new burner will give you what you want and relatively cheaply (burners are 200€ trade, so cheaper to renew than overhaul.) Oil boilers and burners are heat ranged - 34kw boilers and a matching burner (for about 700€ or so the pair) can be set to between around 18kW and 34kw.... again, all mentioned in the piece.        
  4. Yes, flow rather than pressure is the problem. The only real cure is to use the recommended 18mm supply pipe form the mains inlet and reduce as required nearer the points of use.
  5. It might be worth asking for premium fuel next delivery. It is slightly more expensive, but has an anti-waxing agent in it. And if your diesel was delivered in summer, it is likely to be standard. Rather strangely, most burners are specified to operate only down to 0C - bizarre.
  6. The red button is the burner lockout - the burner has failed to ignite the fuel. I suspect there is a fuel supply issue, probably a partially blocked filter. The viscosity of the oil will exagerate this problem. Or the electrodes are dirty or poorly set. I can give you the settings for these if you wish. It is not difficult to remove the burner and clean the electrodes and the gun assembly - I would clean the swirl plate too. It is also possible that the oil pressure has been set marginally. I would suggest a chauffagiste measures both the pump aspiration and the delivery pressure to ascertain the problem. When the boiler does run, does it cough/hunt?
  7. (Sorry the devis extract format is a bit wonky - I translated the items and everything went a little tits) 16mm isn't compatible with 15mm, but you can buy various converters. If you have a peep at the sticky "Oil Heating blah.." there are a couple of examples. You can buy 15mm copper connectors here too. At a pinch, it is sometimes possible to use a 16mm 1/2" BSP compression fitting or rad valve with a 15mm BRASS olive. I wouldn't recommend this course of action since it is dependant on the machining of the fitting somewhat.... 10mm is for the oil supply. 22mm is for distribution and 16mm is for the rad connections. The 10mm and 22mm are the same as the UK, and as you say, are O/D. 28mm is the same too, for reference. Have a squint through the Comap site - they sell 15mm stuff. http://www.cedeo.fr/cat_cedeo/chauffage_solaire_3.htm  
  8. Asbestos removal can be expensive - and difficult to find approved contractors - it can stop a job dead.
  9. Ah.... the original poster wanted to know where and what to buy to self-install. I think €3500 is slightly more than €750. A competent DIYer can fit an entire central heating system for that and still buy a round of Gallettes. We fit Franco-Belge (without DHW) and the like for rather less, dependant on exact model and existing installation state... of course. We sell the old boiler... good market amongst the pikeys round here. For those who want to know what things cost, here is a devis extract. Prices are trade, but can be found by careful "shopping" Article Marque/Fab HT TTC 17-33kW Boiler and Burner Deville 620.40 € 742.00 €     Alternative Gicleur Danfoss 5.84 € 6.99 €     12 Rads (4 x 2.2kW, 4 x 1.8 kW, 4 x 1.2 kW) Belge  444.85 € 532.04 €     Oil Tank (Plastic 1000L bunded) SotraLentz 479.47 € 573.45 €     Oil Filter assy Watts 15.99 € 19.12 €     Tank fittings Combifuel 45.15 € 54.00 €     10 TRVs Danfoss 92.06 € 110.10 €     12 Lockshield valves Watts 40.13 € 48.00 €     2 Wheelhead valves Watts 6.69 € 8.00 €     Alpha Pro/+ 25/60 6m pump Grundfos 91.97 € 110.00 €     Pump gate valves Hammel 9.20 € 11.00 €     12L Expansion vessel Hammel 12.39 € 14.82 €     Relief valve and gauge Watts 5.10 € 6.10 €     Boiler iron connectors Hammel 18.39 € 22.00 €     Boiler flexis x 2 Hammel 23.41 € 28.00 €     Auto Air Vent Caleffi 4.35 € 5.20 €     Programmer Danfoss 43.48 € 52.00 €     Room stat Honeywell 9.20 € 11.00 €     Frost stat Honeywell 8.36 € 10.00 €     22m Cu pipe x 40m Comap 102.17 € 122.20 €     16mm Cu pipe x 50m Comap 72.74 € 87.00 €     10mm Cu pipe x 16m Comap 16.59 € 19.84 €     10mm fittings Comap 8.36 € 10.00 €     16mm fittings Comap 33.44 € 40.00 €     22mm fittings Comap 45.99 € 55.00 €     Iron/flexi fittings Hammel 20.90 € 25.00 €     125mm Flue tee Inox Poujoulat 20.82 € 24.90 €     125mm Flue 1m x 5 Poujoulat 29.68 € 35.50 €     125mm 1m x 1 Poujoulat 15.80 € 18.90 €     125mm Chappeau Poujoulat 10.79 € 12.90 €     Shutoff valves 33/42 x 2 10.03 € 12.00 €     Pipe clips (various)  20.07 € 24.00 €     Pipe insulation  22mm x 40m 10.03 € 12.00 €     Pipe insulation 16mm x 35m 7.53 € 9.00 €     Anti-Gel x 20L GEB 75.17 € 89.90 €     Inhibitor x 2L GEB 9.87 € 11.80 €     Material Total 2,476.56 € 2,961.96 €
  10. Received a call from a friend asking for some immediate assistance due to his mains water pipes freezing last night.... the situation looks worse for tonight! Another bleedin' wellies job. La Meteo predicts the following temps: Lorraine -9C, Pays de la Loire and Centre -7C, Basse Normandie -6C, Limousin -9C and most other regions are around -2C to -4C. If you have a contingency plan, review it now....!  
  11. I am in the trade, and for the DIY market boilers, the trade suppliers cannot compete with the large national Bricos on price. I note that you haven't mentioned what you paid, taking the TVA reduction into account. How much change did you get from 2000 Euros? 
  12. Private individuals will find that the likes of Leroy Merlin, Mr Brico etc sell good quality budget boilers (simple is good!) with and without burners and with and without integral hot tanks. Expect to pay around 750 Euros for a boiler and burner, and double that for one with a hot water tank within. All the boilers sold here are CE marked, and makes such as DeVille (French) and Lamborghini (Italian) are common. High end boilers like DeDietrich, Buderus and Geminox are usually only obtainable from dealers, and are quite sophisticated, and premium prices.
  13. The calorific value of oil is higher than that of GPL, but I doubt you will save any money switching. Your problem is not the fuel - it is the way you are using it, I suspect. You only need to add heat if you are losing it!!!!!!! Some of the new homes here are so well insulated and draughtproofed that no additional heat is required in the living room if there are 6 adults in it! In terms of "renewable" oil, the French gov have begun to look into the utilisation of Rapeseed oil and the like to supplement mineral oil in heating and vehicular diesel. Given that the current land utilisation (and there is a lot of arable land in France!!) is given over to other forms of alimentation, there is a serious opportunity here. I am not sure what kind of fuel Pangur is thinking of switching to.... Gas? Not much of that left... Electricity? Unaffordable and chronically inefficient... Wood? Hmmm.. really convenient and dirty... Geothermal? - You will be dead by the time it pays back. Solar? Great for Hot Water south of the Loire, bad for anything else. I will be intrigued to know!  I doubt my grandchildren will be burning the same kind of fuel in anything as we do today... 
  14. Not sure which size (power) your boiler is within the range, but you should have the smallest (23kW) unless high hot water flow is a particular issue for you. The boiler is quite efficient, but heating only 5 rads is a bit hammer/walnut. It is not convertible, and even if it was, the boiler probably isn't the problem. One assumes that the boiler has been correctly set up for GPL??? And adjusted? It is important to set the gas pressure with a manometer. I would look at your usage patterns carefully, but in particular the rad sizing and house insulation. If you are having to run the boiler 24/7, or have difficulty getting the rooms warm, or having to run the boiler above 60C flow, you need to increase the size of the rads considerably or add more. You are looking to dissipate the heat in the rads and not the lossy pipes. 
  15. Yes, they are fairly simple to fit. It's just screwed in - you need to be careful with the electrode wires and settings and the secondary air setting. These are detailed in the burner manual. Before you do change the injector, find someone to set the pressure afterwards, and adjust the air for you.
  16. The boiler will run for a period until the water temperature reaches the temperature set on the Aquastat on the control panel. The normal temperature setting would be 60-65C on this. The Aquastat has a hysterisis of about 6-8 C, so once the water temperature drops by this amount, the burner will restart. This is repeated until the power is cut by either a programmer and/or the room stat or frost stat. The problem with short-cycling (where the burner cuts in and out very frequently) is due to the burner being set to provide too much power. By default, burners are set to maximum from the factory. This means you probably have a 32 kW boiler for a 20 Kw demand. To rectify this involves changing the injector (the brass nozzle) for a smaller one in accord with the table in the burner manual. You probably only need about 20-22kw (I'm guessing) so you are looking for an injector of 0.50 gph maximum, with a fuel pressure of 12 bar. You could also try an injector of 0.40 gph set to 14 bar. It is possible to reduce the fuel pressure you currently have, but below about 10-11 bar, the injector will chatter and the flame will be instable - injectors have a shut-off function to avoid drips from residual pressure. To effect the pressure adjustment will require the use of a pressure gauge (which is screwed into the bleed screw temporarily). I suspect that you could change the injector yourself and ask a local chauffagiste to set the pressure pour boire. The air settings will also require adjustment once the injector and pressure are done. The resultant power reduction will enhance both the economy of the system and improve the longevity of the burner. And it will run somewhat quieter...
  17. Well Insulated and French house = Oxymoron I take your point, but can't recall ever seeing a proper vent set-up, not that I've taken THAT much notice.
  18. Firstly, I am not an expert on VMC, by any means. But for what it's worth: VMCs or VMIs can be used full time, though I have never seen instructions saying that they can only be hardwired to the tableau. Typical instructions I have on CD state that the switch (run/marche) can be placed wherever convenient. I would suggest that since these units can shift "hundreds" of m3 of air an hour, an awul lot of (expensive) heat is going to be drawn out of the building. The advantage of Hygrostat control is clear. Most new builds have VMC double, which incorporates heat recovery for this very reason.  I think in the final analysis, the owner must judge whether any extraction system needs to be on all the time, but cannot think of an obvious or economic reason why this should be so. I personally think they are excellent, and would thus use them in accord with the needs of the application.
  19. There are either manual or automatic VMCs. The cheaper manual ones (40-50 Euros) come with just a speed control switch. The general idea is that they are controlled by a light or a seperate on/off switch somewhere. They shouldn't be running 24/7, but often are where there has been a damp problem. The other type, which are about 15-20 Euros dearer have a Hygrostat in them that detects moisture. The VMC thus switches on and off according to the level of moisture in the air at ANY of the inlet ports. These usually come with speed switch too, which allows variation in extraction power. All VMCs have some means of controlling the level of extraction in each port. This can be as simple as a thin flexible baffle. VMCs are designed to avoid having to pierce thick stone walls. The normal exhaust port is through a roof plate, or through the eaves. If the eaves method is used, avoid birds and other unwanted guests entering the VMC by adding a grille to the pipe outlet.  
  20. Have been to a number of heating systems in the past few days where the owner had to regularly top up the water pressure and bleed some of the radiators frequently. There are a number of possible causes. Assuming there are no obvious water leaks, which must be dealt with first, 2 main culprits seem to prevail. Firstly, compression joints. These convenient connection media are able to admit air without necessarily leaking water. Neat huh? The system pump is able to exert a degree of depression on the water circuit, and from time to time a tiny amount of air can be pulled past the olive. The fix? If the idea of draining the system and undoing every compression joint (including those on the rad valves) to apply jointing compound and re-tightening the joints fills you with the desire to throw yourself off a bridge, you can try nipping the joint(s) up using a GOOD spanner. Don't go mad. The other (more common) means of air getting sucked in to the system is via the radiator valves. These simple animals use a rope/graphite grease gland seal around the spindle. You can often tell which ones are not good because the spindles are rather easy to turn and instead of being bright brass coloured, they have gone dark. The answer is to nip up the gland nut a few flats. We have found that the worst offenders are the UK ones! The particularly bad ones are "Cosmos" and "Nova". These are cheap and made in China; nuff said. Not sure how they appeared in France, but.... If you have pump shut-off valves, don't forget to nip the gland nuts on these too. The pump will draw air in readily. I've taken to going round all glands after the initial high temp run and nipping them up - surprisingly few are tight. Can be other things, of course. These are the things found recently.
  21. Heat loss in copper pipes is about 100W/m for 22mm, 60W/m for 16mm. This is for pipe at 80C, with an ambient temperature of 20C. So for a 10m run of 22mm you are looking at up to 1kW of loss. The higher you set the boiler stat, the worse the losses are, obviously. I suggest the boiler flow is set to around 60C. Note that when purging the system initially, it is important to run the boiler at >80C for a period to allow the aerated water to release air.  The room stat must control both the boiler and the pump. Normally, the switched output of the stat is used to supply mains to both the pump and the boiler, or the pump is wired to the boiler and SHOULD allow the pump to continuing running whilst the boiler switches on and off according to the heat demand. The boiler MUST NOT fire with the pump off. 
  22. Seems that some people are getting through heating oil rather faster than perhaps they should?? Apart from the obvious poor building insulation, pipe insulation and draughtproofing, there may be a lack of efficient control and operation of the heating system - and I realise that most people have inherited their system. timers/programmers - simple to install, can provide both improved comfort and economy. Correctly set and USED of course...room thermostats - correctly sited, correctly set will provide control over temperature and thus energy useThermostatic radiator valves (TRVs) - control the temperature in each room - save energy - don't fit one where the room stat isbalance the system - are all the radiators equally hot?can the system water flow well? - if you have black sludge in the rads, don't expect an efficient systemregulate the boiler temperature - anything more than 60/65C is wasted - if the house won't warm at this, the rads are too small, or blockedfrost stat - rather than keep a system running all night, let a frost stat run the system only when neededHot water temperature - applies to Chauffe-Eau too - anything hotter than 65C is wasted energy and can scald - turn it downmake sure the hot water is on a programmer too....does your boiler keep switching on and off? - it should do, but if it comes on for a minute or two every few minutes, the boiler power is far too high - inefficient and the burner will wear out quickly. Have the power reduced and save big money.Is the boiler running efficiently? - is it clean inside? - has it been correctly set-up? does it smoke?Is your mixer valve set correctly? - the vannes melangeuse is a bit of a joke, if you have one, make sure it is fully openconsider fitting zone valves if your system could be splitI haven't seen a single system, of any age here that I could say was an efficient and economical system. Quite how someone can have a gas boiler fitted for 4500 Euros (yikes!) where the owner had to plug it into a socket to operate it is just *./',',/ ridiculous.    
  23. In the ideal world, you would run 2 off 16 or 18mm pipes from the stop tap to the C/E and the cold tap split off point. In the real world, and assuming your water pressure and flow is as good as normal in France, it is common to supply the cold main in 18mm almost to the C/E and then take the cold and C/E supply off in 16mm. Maintain 16mm in both hot and cold up to the point of bathroom entry, then drop to 14mm for the shower and 12mm to the sink and loo (which will need to be 10mm just before the robinette). Ultimate flow will depend on the length of the pipes, the number of couplings and the pressure/flow from the mains. And every installation is different...!  
  24. I can vouch for the Aldi "beans in a jar" - pretty damn good. Unlike my daughters, I like a little Comte melted in until it becomes just plastic.  
  25. Sounds like your noise was more "howling" than coughing then. As long as the flame quality is still OK, I would leave the air setting at the new setting. If the flame quality is not right, try the air the other side of the original setting. Sounds like you had a resonance problem, and sometimes the settings for fuel pressure and air flow have to be shifted up or down slightly to avoid it. It often makes itself known when the electrodes are arcing at start up, and then disappears once the flame is self-sustaining.
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