- [Narrator] Plumberparts.co.uk.
Honest reviews and advice.
- Hold tight, and welcome to today's
plumberparts.co.uk video.
My name's James and today
we're going to be having a very quick look
at the murky, dark world
of top-entry immersion heaters.
Now, this immersion heater here isn't working very well.
Or it's not working at all.
They basically found out
because their heating system went mad.
They turned their immersion on as a backup
and nothing happened.
Next thing you know, I'm getting a phone call.
Oh my God, we got no hot water.
Get Jimmy from Plumber Parts out here right now.
So here I am.
So basically the procedure that we go through
when we change an immersion heater is
to firstly isolate electrically the immersion heater.
Make sure that's done.
If you're not happy doing that
then I suggest you don't even carry on with this job
and get a proper real plumber like me
to come out and do it.
The next thing we need to do is
turn off the cold water supply
to the bottom of the hot water tank.
Then we drain down the hot water at the top.
We can do that firstly by opening
all the hot taps in the house.
And then secondly, by finding the drain off
at the bottom of the tank.
Now because this is a top-entry immersion heater
all we'll need to do is drain out
a couple of litres out of the whole tank itself.
Also, I'd say as a small tip
is to try to try and loosen off the immersion
when it's full of water, okay?
'Cause that water tends to stabilise the copper tank
because they can be prone to ripping
because you've got a very fine, thin copper wall
that's holding the whole tank together.
So do that first.
Make sure then that you drain off about five to ten litres
worth of water.
You should know that it's drained out okay
if you crack the nut on the outlet at the top.
You'll know then that everything's all right.
So anyway, if you follow us as we go along and do it,
I'm sure you're gonna enjoy this as much as I am
because this is the best job you could ever do.
Especially when you're round one of your mate's houses.
Hey, Dave?
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this video
and it helps you out if you've got
a top-entry immersion heater that's gone wrong.
Hold tight.
So nice and easy when it comes to switching this off.
It's just on this plug here.
We can just unplug this plug
and then we know that there's no power
going into our immersion heater.
So if we take a closer look at the actual tank itself.
This here is our hot outlet, okay?
So this is the hot water that's going out to our taps.
Obviously we've got our immersion heater
at the top just there.
Down here we have our flow and return
from the coil of the boiler.
So there's our flow there and that goes through a coil
and then back out.
Nice and simple.
A little bypass valve down there.
But then the bit that we're worried about at the moment
is the cold feed.
So we have our drain off just here, like so.
We follow this pipe up.
We should be able to see that we've got a big valve.
This one here.
So what I'm gonna do is turn off this valve here now.
You should now be able to open up all the hot supplies.
What that's doing at the moment is draining out
the expansion pipe up to loft.
Now as you can see that's pretty much stopped running now.
At this point if we find that this is still dripping here,
you've probably got a problem with that valve there holding.
Therefore you might have to turn the mains off,
open that valve up fully again
and then basically drain the whole tank out.
Alternatively, if you have the facilities,
you can actually bone the tank
but you need special bones to do that.
And if you're here watching the video
about how to do an immersion heater,
you probably don't have those tools with you.
So, as you can see this is still running a little bit.
We're just going to open up a few more taps
and if we've got a problem with that valve,
we'll address that now.
Right, so now we've got the water off.
We know that the valve's holding.
And basic now, the water level of the hot system
is about up to the top of the tank there.
Before you carry on,
make sure that all the electric isolation
that you've done is okay, all right?
Make sure that you use a voltage tester.
Make sure that you pull any fuses that could be nearby.
And also make sure that you identify
what trip the immersion is on
and throw that trip to the off position as well.
What we're now going to do
is get our hose on the drain off at the bottom of the tank
and get that into a bath or outside in preparation.
But we're not gonna open it just yet
because what we're then gonna do
is remove the electrical wire from the old immersion heater
and make sure that that's nice and loose
before we start draining any water down.
(clanking)
Now to loosen one of these off
you might find you need a myriad of tools.
I often find a nice set of stilsons help.
Obviously you can use the standard immersion spanner
that will fit over the top of the immersion
nice and easily.
And I've got another type here.
You can't really have enough certain tools
to actually remove immersions.
'Cause once they're been in for a long time,
being getting hot and cold all the while,
they can get very, very tight.
So often if this one here doesn't come apart easily,
what I do is sometimes get my blowtorch out,
try and warm it up.
Or also shock it with the hammer.
Just tap round to try and shock apart the seal
and then it should come apart nice and easily.
This is genuinely the most difficult part
of removing a top-entry immersion heater
or a side-entry one for that matter.
So I'm gonna do that now
and hopefully it's gonna come apart okay.
It's quite handy to have a towel for this bit as well
round the bottom of the tank just to catch any drips
because as soon as we've loosened it off,
it might start to leak slightly.
Bet this doesn't come loose first time.
I'll be amazed if it do.
(James groans)
As if. (laughs)
I often resort to stilsons quite quickly
because they're got a nice amount of purchase along here.
Usually means it you can get a lot more force
on the fitting.
(cracking)
Right, there we go.
You see, that's now nice and loose.
So now we straight away go down and open up our drain off.
Probably need a towel for this as well.
They lend to leak too.
So we've only had that going a few seconds now
so we should almost straight away be able to take this off
and find that the water level
is just hovering below the big hole.
Look at that.
What a job, lovely.
Now's always a good time just to get a file
and just file off the old edge and clean this down
ready for your new immersion heater to go in.
This will help in a minute
when it comes to the time of leaks.
(filing)
And get that so we've got a nice flat, shiny face on there.
(filing)
So now we've got our immersion off
and we've drained down the tank,
we've cleaned up that fitting.
It's basically a nice easy matter of getting
our new immersion heater ready to go in.
Most immersion heaters are supplied
with a new gasket o-ring.
If you find that the one you get hasn't got this in it,
you better take it back because someone's pinched it.
Now, this is a lovely, nice new floppy one.
Often what I'll do with these
is add some jointing compound to that
to make sure that we get a decent joint.
Also, to make sure sometimes
I'll pop a little bit of PTFE round this thread as well.
Really you only want to do this once
'cause it's just hassle trying to fit it all up again.
So I'm just gonna get this prepared now
and get it ready to go it.
(James sings)
So now we're ready to go back in.
We're just going to feed nice and easily.
Our immersion should stay on here and then we're gonna start
to screw that on there just like that.
That started perfectly.
Often they'll go on cross-threaded
so you have to be very careful about how you screw these on.
And then basically we use our tools again
just to nip this up nice and lightly.
We don't need to over tighten this.
If we find that once we've filled it up
we've got a little drip here
then we can tighten it up a little bit.
Right, nipper.
(Groans)
Right, so now we've got the immersion tightened up.
Usually what I like to do before we turn the water on
is just cut a small amount of the foam away.
It's not gonna make a massive difference
to the thermal efficiency of this tank
but foam can sometimes disguise any small leaks you've got.
So it's more important now to find out
whether we've got any leaks than anything else.
So I'm just gonna cut that away as well.
(cutting)
Right, so we've turned on our water and shut our drain off.
And we've turned off all the other hot taps.
As you can see, if we have a good look here,
you should see we've got no leaks at all.
Excellent, so far we've got the water back on,
we've got our immersion back in.
We've got it all tightened up
and we know that there's no problems.
Basically we've gone in reverse what we did at the start.
Now, before you rewire it up and all that sort of stuff,
I'd say just go off and have a cup of tea
or a cup of coffee.
Just make sure for a fact that that small flange
around the outside of your new immersion isn't leaking.
'Cause sometimes it can take a few minutes
for a leak to appear.
Once you've had a cup of tea
or you've watched the latest episode of The Chase,
then basically I'd say is you follow
the manufacturer's instructions.
You rip off the new head off your new bit like that.
And you'll find that usually all your connexions
are inside ready to go or they're sometimes in a little bag
just underneath the head like that.
Wire it up according to manufacturer's instructions.
When it comes to the wiring,
most new immersion heaters are the same.
But obviously at the same time, check your instructions.
Here we've got our wire clamps.
Our wires are gonna pass through this
and get clamped up.
We've got our neutral terminal here.
We've got our earth terminal here
with an anti-vibration clamp on it.
And also we've got our live in here
which will be switched with our thermostat just there.
So before I forget, I'm just gonna set our thermostat
to about 55 degrees.
And now I'm gonna wire it up just like this
with our earth wire here,
our neutral wire nicely clamped here
and our live wire going around here.
And then we've made sure that it's all clamped there
so that can't be moved out of the way.
Pop the cover back on
and make sure that that's all okay
and only then can you plug it all back in
and you should hear if it's cool enough in the water,
a nice hiss from the system
and that should be the end of the job.
I hope you found today's video interesting
and helpful and informative.
If you need any more help,
visit our website plumberparts.co.uk.
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- [Narrator] Plumberparts.co.uk.
Honest reviews and advice.