- Yeah, yeah!
And, welcome to this plumberparts.co.uk video.
Today, I'm going to tell you about
balancing heating systems.
Why you should do it, the symptoms that mean
you might have to do it and how to do it.
Firstly, lets have a look at the general layout
of a heating system.
Have a look at schematically because
that will help you understand why balancing
a heating system is so important.
Let's say we have two stories, level one and ground.
We have the boiler at the bottom.
Coming out of the boiler we have a pump
that goes up, through diverter valve,
through some radiator's upstairs.
And, then downstairs, with common returns,
going back to the boiler.
Okay, so we've got radiator's here.
The first reason that heating systems should be
balanced is even if there is a pump on the heating
system, hot water naturally likes to gravitate up.
And stay upstairs and then make it's quick route
back to the boiler.
So what we often find, is the radiator's upstairs
are getting loads of heat when the one's downstairs,
are still really quite cold.
So what you should do, is go to the lock shield
on the radiator's upstairs, close them and
then open them about a quarter of a turn.
You won't necessarily see any difference in the
radiator's heat capacity or not but you will notice
that more hot water flow is diverted
to the radiator's downstairs.
Now, you go downstairs make sure those radiator's
are open and that means the heating system
should be balanced.
Another reason you should balance your heating system
is, say, this radiator is getting hot,
that one's getting hot, and this one's getting hot,
the last radiator on the line isn't getting so hot.
That's because these three radiator's are effectively
pinching all the hot water flow delivered by
the boiler and the pump.
What you do then, is remove the lock shield
on these radiator's here, straddle those two up there,
down, shut them, give them a quarter of a turn.
This one here, bring that down, shut them,
then give a quarter of a turn.
We also do a video on one radiator isn't getting hot
'cause it can be more than one reason, not
just the fact the system isn't balanced.
But, that is a brief idea of how you balance
the system and why.
Now, let's take a quick look at the lock shield,
how to shut it and also, give it that
quarter of a turn to make sure it is all balanced.
So, here we are, upstairs, okay.
Now the radiator's up here get really hot,
so let's have a look at how we're gonna
straddle this one down and balance this system.
So, here we are with our first upstairs radiator.
There is four in this system upstairs and
do the same thing to each one.
Here's the lock shield here, note the T on the end.
Pop the the lock shield cap off, and close it
by turning it anti-clockwise.
Once it's fully closed, just slack it back a quarter
of a turn.
Do that to each radiator upstairs, and you should
find then that each radiator side of the heating
system is balanced.
Now, let's have a look at what you can do to balance
out the hot water coil on your heating cylinder,
if you have an indirect one.
Right, so we had a look at how to balance
the radiator's on a heating system.
Now, we are going to have a look at
how to balance the hot water coil
on the indirect cylinder.
A lot of houses in the UK have indirect hot water
coils on the cylinder.
That means, hot water from boiler is passed through
a coil in the cylinder and that heats the water up.
Now, often these coils are 22 mm in pipe size
and when the valve opens up to let hot water
through that coil, it pinches loads of heat
from the radiators.
Therefore, the indirect hot water coil should
also be balanced and regulated.
Most plumbers when installing an indirect
hot water cylinder, will put a flow regulating
valve on the return side of the coil.
Let's have a look at it.
So, you have your boiler, your pump and your three
port valve or if you have less plan, it will just
be a two port valve for each side.
You have all your radiator's with their frozen returns.
We have the flow coming up here from the boiler,
goes through the valve into our hot water coil
and our cylinder and then back out.
And, it's here that we fit the flow regulating valve
on the return side of the hot water coil.
That will go back into the return side of the boiler.
So, to recap, we have the boiler, the pump and
our diverter valves.
The radiator's upstairs have been
straddled down and regulated.
The one's downstairs are getting
a good flow of hot water.
We've also straddled down the return on the
indirect hot water cylinder and the whole
heating system is now working properly.
Remember, balancing a heating system out,
all you need to do, is give each component
in the heating system an equal amount of flow
so the heating system, heat's up equally.
If you want anymore information, visit our website
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I hope you found this video helpful, if you think
we missed anything out or you want to ask us
any questions, just comment on this video and
we'll do our best.
Thanks very much, see you soon guys.
Blup!
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