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Hi, and welcome to another plumberparts.co.uk video.
Today, I'm going to give you a quick bit of advice about how
to get your radiator working if only one's working.
Now I've seen a few other videos on the Internet
about how to do this, and some of them are plain wrong,
and some of them could actually cause leaks
in your house if you do it wrong.
Here's the radiator in question.
All the other rads in the house are burning hot,
the boiler's on, the pump's running,
and the thermostat in the room's calling for heat.
But this one radiator here isn't getting hot.
We feel these pipes here.
There's no heat coming down here at all,
and as I said, all the other radiators are hot in the house.
So the first thing we do is check
that the lock shield is open.
All you need to do is remove the lock shield cap.
You'll find the lock shield valve bit here.
Get a set of adjustables on there.
Open that fully up.
Turn that all the way you can anti-clockwise.
Okay, keep going and keep going.
Now you never know, now you might find
that you've got heat coming into the radiator.
To get the earliest affirmative answers to whether
there's heat going into the radiator,
instead of feeling the radiator itself at the bottom
or the top, feel the two pipes going to it.
One will be a flow pipe, and one'll be a return pipe,
and if now you've opened up your lock shield,
and you feel one of these two pipes getting warm,
then you know you're getting flow.
However, that might not have solved your problem.
You could still have air in the radiators.
The symptoms of air in your radiators
are quite simple to describe.
If you already have a hot flow and return
going to the radiator, if you felt down the radiator,
it should be warm at the bottom,
and at the top it would be cold.
This is always a sign of air being in the rads.
But before you get mental trying to bleed all the air out
of the radiators, I strongly recommend
you turn the boiler and the pump off.
Anyway, here's how you bleed a rad.
Right, so here's how to bleed your radiator.
Your boiler and your pump are turned off.
Both radiator valves are open.
Even though we haven't looked at the TRV yet,
so that could be stuck shut.
We'll look at that in a minute.
Just get a little bit of cloth,
get your radiator key in there.
Open that.
Fortunately, you can see we've got water there already.
Just let that run for a few seconds.
That's great.
Now usually when there's air in there,
obviously you have a lot of air coming out
before you get to water.
Obviously, if the radiator does have air
in the top of it, you will get air coming out.
You'll be able to hear it really easily.
It'll be a nice, slight hiss, and you can control easily
the rate at which it comes out using this key.
As soon as you get a bit of water come out,
just tighten it up, wipe up any excess water
that might have spilled on the floor,
or something like that.
And then you should feel the radiator
at the top getting nice and hot.
The next problem you can have is the fact that your TRV,
or the control head for the radiator, is stuck shut.
This is where I've seen a few of the other videos
on the Internet telling you how to do
this sort of thing have gone wrong.
Now, let's just go over it very slowly,
and if you follow our instructions, you should be able
to get it working just fine again.
If not, we'll give you a quick guide on how to change a TRV.
So here's the thermostatic radiator valve in question.
First thing you need to do is make sure
it's fully turned on.
So at the moment, it's on setting number five out of five.
Next, you have to be able to remove the TRV head.
Now there's a few different ways to do this.
This one here is just a screw-on collar.
Some of the other ones, like by manufacturers like Danfoss
have a black plastic lug that you have to pop
a screwdriver into, pop that out, and then you just
quarter-turn twist it, and it'll lift off.
But this one's a collar-screw one.
You put that there, and that means
there we can reveal the head here.
Now this one I know works.
The way you can figure that one out is
you just press this pin down like that.
Some of them, the pin will be stuck down.
On this particular type, the best way to do this
is to, while it's stuck down, just pressing it
a little bit and see if that'll bring it up.
The best way to deal with these is to be gentle.
Don't hit them with a hammer.
Now this particular model won't have that problem
but if you got a tradition pin-type TRV,
if you hit it with a hammer, often the pin will just fly out
and you'll have a lovely fountain of water just come out.
The best way to deal with the pin types,
is to get a very small set of long-nosed pliers.
This is a set of long-nosed pliers,
and what you do is you grip the pin itself
and you just wiggle it upwards.
Just pull it out yourself, and pull it up,
and that'll get it working with any luck.
Sometimes you'll find once you've got it free,
you can push back down the pin, and it will stay stuck down.
At that point, you're probably going to be looking at
getting a new TRV for that particular radiator.
This particular type here, fortunately because
we don't have that problem with it
being a traditional-type pin, the best way I find
to deal with these, would be to get a large-ish,
if it's stuck down, get a large bit like that,
and then to slightly tap it.
Just to shock it.
That's all you need to do.
You're not trying to bash the hell out of this so it moves.
All you need to do is shock the tension
out of what's holding it in place.
And then it should pop up and then if you've bled
the radiator of air, you've undone the TRV,
and the lock shield, you've got a great flow.
You should then have a hot radiator.
I hope you found that video helpful in telling you how
to get your one radiator from working again.
If you find that you've got two or three radiators
on a long run that aren't working, the potential problem
for this system could be that it is not balanced.
We are going to do a video for balancing radiators,
and if you check our channel,
or you if check our related videos,
you should find it there.
If you have any more problems, you can contact us,
or visit our website at plumberparts.co.uk.
Thanks ever so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.
Bye bye.
Plumberparts.co.uk, honest reviews and advice.
Sponsored by heatandplumb.com