- Hold tight, welcome to this Plumberparts.co.uk video
all about how to remove a radiator off the wall
and cap it in the floor
if you just don't want that radiator being used anymore.
Before we continue with the video,
please do subscribe to our videos.
Also, make sure that you follow us
on Twitter and Facebook as well,
where we upload loads of silly stuff on a weekly basis,
and remember to hold tight.
See you soon!
(man whistles)
Plumberparts.co.uk,
home of Find Your Plumber.
So basically, my mate Jordan's rung me up,
he's like "James, can you take some time out of your busy
schedule to come out and just take this radiator off the
wall, cap it off on the floor,
because basically this room is above
a load of radiators downstairs
and it's just a really warm room
and we're in a mid-terrace house here as well,
So basically, the only real external wall in this room
is that one just there."
So I was like,
"Don't worry Jordan, I'll come out and do that right now.
All you need to do is just
grab me a couple of beers in the pub."
Did you hear that Jordan?
- [Jordan] I hear that.
- Jordan's on his way upstairs right now,
and if there's one lesson you guys wanna learn,
if you're just a DIYer
and you have someone come around your house
to do any work, the first thing you do is this.
Love me do on here.
Alright, okay, alright sweetheart.
So, I'm gonna take you through the brief steps
that you need to know on how to do this sort of job.
It's very, very simple.
So, if you're a DIYer that's gonna have you do that,
but more from my perspective, if you're an apprentice,
it's gonna give you a bit of an idea.
Forewarn you, so if you're out there with your employer,
they don't give you a thick head,
'cause you've done it wrong,
because if you do it wrong, you're gonna get a thick head.
You're only on three quit an hour,
you might as well get beat around the head once in a while.
So anyway, let's break this job down
into a few little stages, very easy.
Firstly, the drain down stage.
Secondly, the removing of floorboards
to see where the pipes are
and taking the radiator off the wall stage.
The third stage is basically capping off the pipes.
That's pretty much the easiest bit.
The fourth stage is filling up, reinstating,
and inhibiting the heating system.
So that's basically the few stages that we got
in this one here.
Alright, so the first thing we do is switch the boiler off.
Now you can either do it on the wall like this,
or find another place to do it.
Now, the next thing you need to do is make sure
that the water and the heating system
isn't going to replenish as you start drowning it out.
If you've got a loft tank in the loft,
it might be a little bit beyond you
if you're just a standard DIY to turn that off.
Basically, what you need to do is, I'd say,
just find out where your main stop clock is,
shut that off, but before you do that,
remember, if you look at this t-shirt that we sell,
to fill the kettle up before you do that.
It's super important.
So that next thing, once you've got the water off
and you know you're happy with that,
because we got a combi system here.
We got a filling loop on here like that.
We know that it's not going to replenish straight away,
because it's on a pressurised system.
Make a note of what the pressure is in the system
at the moment.
Try to make that note when the system's cold.
Most heating systems, pressurised ones in the UK,
when they're cold, they wanna be pressurised to one bar.
So make sure that when you finish doing that all later on,
you can re-pressurize the system up to where it should be.
So the next thing you wanna do is find out
where to drain the heating system from
and you wouldn't believe it, there's a drain off down here.
Alright, so we got a drain off down here
and I'm sure you lot have all used drain offs before.
On you go.
Must be love.
They fit so well.
A bit of water coming out there already,
might little bit of towel under here.
They sometimes leak, look at that leaking.
Old El Paso, eight super soft tortillas.
What did you use these for then, Jordan?
Were you cooking for the wife?
- [Jordan] Not a bit.
- You didn't do anything with them.
(man mumbles)
Alright, so now we're running that into there.
This is a common thing, so if you do wipe it up,
you dry it off.
You find it's gettin' a bit of wee wees going on.
This is the only way you're gonna get around it, I'm afraid.
It's also important to recognise at this point as well,
that we are effectively going to be adding
fresh water back into the heating system
when we finish this job.
So you're going to need to put
a little tub of inhibitor in somewhere or other.
That's draining out nicely at the moment.
And you know what?
I've run it out of the door as well.
There has been a time or two where you've just sort of
plugged the hose in and forget where you've run it.
Now if you can go upstairs and open up the bleed keys
on the radiators upstairs.
Let's go!
Right, so back up on the radiator.
We've got the system draining out now.
The pressure's dropping nicely on the boiler.
All we gotta do is just let the air in
at the top of this system, okay?
So now, this radiator that we're gonna take off the wall
is draining out.
Make sure you open up both valves as well, the TRV,
and the lock shield.
So then cretans, time for us to do a little checklist
before we move on.
So number one, the boiler and the water supply
has been switched off,
so there's not electrics going to the boiler.
There's nothing going to the water supply.
So the system won't replenish,
or obviously, if it's on a pressurised system,
the filling loop is shut.
We've also then put our hose pump on the drain off
and started draining out.
We've opened up the radiator valves upstairs
or wherever we're working
and we're draining out the system as well.
Obviously, if the radiator that you're working on
is downstairs,
you're gonna have to drain all of the upstairs
systems as well, and all of the radiators downstairs too.
Try and make sure that there's not water in the radiator,
before moving on to the next stage.
So, I'm just gonna go and finish off me cup of tea
and then in a moment of total trepidation,
much likened to, I don't know,
the film The Pianist, by Roman Polanski.
We're then gonna pull back the carpet
to see what the floorboards are made of.
Now, the moment of truth.
Whether this job's gonna be easy or hard.
Now pull this bit back and straight away,
let's see we've got chip board floor,
which somehow starts to fill me with dread.
It's alot easier for you to raise a floorboard floor.
Usually, you can just take out the floorboard,
it's individual, and then cap off the pipe underneath,
or do whatever work you need to do.
With chipboard, you've gotta cut yourself a hole.
So, at the moment, my body go nip nip,
like a bunny rabbit's nose.
But let's have a little [Indistinct] look.
Ah ha!
(electronic alert)
Looks like someone's been here before.
They've butchered the floor already.
So this job's just getting easier and easier at the moment,
thank God.
But obviously you guys might have more difficulty with this.
Whenever you're chopping under floors or anything like that,
really, really, be careful.
Don't cut too deep, because you know for a fact
there's pipes nearby, so you don't want to get anything
like caught on the pipework or anything like that
and cause leaks later on down the line.
So, we've opened this one up here.
I mean, it's just been held in.
We can even see the pipe that feeds this
and it is a job of discovery sometimes, this job.
And we've now discovered
that the pipes feeding this radiator,
we've got copper tails and it's coming up in plastic pipe
up to the elbow up, which is tightly fine.
It's a pretty standard thing for people to do these days,
but obviously the copper tails make things look nice.
So all we need to do, is we're gonna whip that one up there,
find the pipe there as well.
It's effectively a quick job where we just cut the pipe,
we put an insert into the pipe, into the plastic pipe
and then we just gonna push
a couple of caps on there like that
and then we are all done.
Nice and easy, and that's the main job over.
Obviously a problem that you guys might have
a lot of the time is that this could be copper pipe.
You can still use those push fits.
The thing is right, if it was copper pipe, I wouldn't.
If it was me, I much prefer to solder those on,
just put some solder caps on,
or I suppose you can use compression caps as well,
compression fittings caps.
So anyway, the next thing, before we cut this pipe,
which is kind of like the point of no return,
I'm gonna shut both valves on each side here.
We're just gonna slack it off the knot there and there
and once we've done that, we'll be able to find out
whether there's any water coming out,
whether it's safe to continue.
If there's no water coming out,
I know then that I can cut the pipe there,
do it nice and quick, just bang the bit on.
If you really want to and you've got enough room,
grab yourself a little towel
and just lay that in there as well.
So if you do get like, you know, a pint of water
or something like that come out, if you're not quick enough,
at least then it's not gonna get downstairs
and put a stain in the ceiling below
or cause problems in the floor
if you're on the ground floor.
So, right, so number one.
Let's shut this one off.
I'll do this first one while I'm laying here,
'cause I like laying down working
and we shall just get this slack off,
so it's nice and loose and ready.
(fast forward speed talking)
Look, no water coming out.
I now know that I am totally free and fine
to continue this job here.
We've got no water comin' out there.
Everything's great.
I can even now, as well, open this apart
and just check there's no water coming out of there as well.
So we know this radiator is now fully empty
and we're ready to move on.
Alright, so we've got our bit where want it.
Alright, so now it is a matter of speed.
(piano music)
Now, you see the problem we've got here with this.
You see that pipe there is nice and crushed.
Even if you put an insert in there,
I'm not gonna be happy with that.
I'd be worried that these edges here,
these kind of hard corners,
might push the rubber out of the fitting,
which is kind of a bit of a problem
with this push fit fittings.
A lot of the time, these rubbers can push out
and no one really knows about it.
So a good thing to do is to get the cut,
then twist, try and twist your cutter
so it's actually cutting alright?
And then, now we can push through.
Now if you look at the difference in cut,
it's a much more rounded cut on there,
so that's ready for this to go on.
So I'm just gonna pop my inset in.
(light rock music)
And there we go, that's that part capped off.
Alright, so there we go, we got one side done.
Let's just whip up here.
(power drill revving)
One thing I didn't say a minute ago,
a good idea as well, when you're removing bits of floor,
give 'em little nicks like that
and then you'll know which way around these bits of floor go
that when you come to put it all back in later on.
But if you want to, we know, I mean I'm pretty confident
that this part's empty now,
but we're just slacking this one off here.
Just make sure, pull that off and then we'll know
that there's not going to be any water out
when we do this cut.
There we go, done.
So now, we are ready to turn the radiator valves off.
The reason we do that is
because it doesn't matter how well
inhibitor and heating system is,
there's always a possibility that there might be some
dirty old water in the radiator.
(tool clanging)
We left our valves on here to make that easier.
Basically, it's time for the strong man moment,
isn't it Jordan?
Basically we're gonna lift this off
and you're gonna take this outside, mate.
In your nice clean clothes.
(man grunting)
Don't worry, we removed Jordan's porn mag.
Right, so now Jordan's gonna decorate behind here.
I'm gonna cut these bits off.
Right, so we've got the radiator off the wall.
We've got all the brackets off the wall.
We've taken the pipes out now.
We capped the pipes.
Now before we reinstate the floor,
the first thing we need to do
is actually fill the heating system up
and make sure that it's all working okay.
If we've got any leaks here,
we need to be able to see them, alright?
So don't put the floor back down.
What we need to do now is close all the radiator vents,
close the drain off, turn the water back on,
fill the heating system up,
and get it up to pressure.
Then you can test the joints or any of the things
that you've worked on.
Make sure that they're all okay
before you put the floorboards back down.
So that's what we're gonna do now and enjoy, you know?
See you there in a sec.
♫ You keep on feeling the heating system, eh eh.
You know I love feeling the heating system. ♫
Right then guys, just been round Jordan's house.
Haven't I Jordan?
Filling up all the radiators.
Managed to brush a pair of knickers.
Oh, was that it?
Cheers Emma, put that in the ol' memory (indistinct).
(man laughing)
What we've done, we've obviously now
put everything back on.
We've pressurised the system.
We've tested for leaks.
Everything's okay.
All the radiators are getting hot.
Now I know I can reinstate this floor,
happy that there's not gonna be any problems.
So we're just gonna wack all this lot down,
back to where it was again.
(hammer pounding)
(drill revving)
So then guys, there you go.
You've seen how to take a radiator off the wall,
how to take the pipes back into the floor.
Obviously this is quite an easy job,
because I mean,
we found out we got plastic pipe under the floor.
It's a pressurised system as well.
So a few apprentices,
hopefully that's given you a better idea
about how to do this.
There's loads of different ways.
There's loads of different problems you can come up against
in doing this job.
So this video isn't the be all and end all of how to do it.
So if you do have any problems
or if you've got any specifics of
things that your coming up against,
please comment in the comments section below.
We try to get back to everyone
within about a week at the most.
Click on the links that are appearing around me right now
to watch some more videos.
We've got plumbing disasters.
We've got subscribe links.
We've also got a couple of other videos as well
that you might want to move on to
that could give you a better knowledge
about your heating system in this job as well.
Thanks ever so much for watching this weeks video.
Jordan, thanks for the teammate.
And I'm gonna see you.