Boiler woes. F22 code. Can anyone help?

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Hello, I'm posting in Chat for traffic but maybe there's a better topic to put this in.

I have a British Gas 330+ boiler. Not a combi one I'm reliably informed. At some point on Thurs night the heating went off and the boiler display showed a flashing F22 code and the word 'dry'.

A BG engineer was summoned and reset the boiler. He showed me how to do this myself and said if it kept doing it, get another BG engineer out.

Today (so far) I have reset it twice due to this F22 code. We know a heating engineer (not BG) who came round and said it's not the pump or the water pressure. (He didn't do anything 'technical' because we have a maintenance contract with BG and didn't want to scupper that.)

I have now booked for a BG engineer to come on Sunday and in the meantime will just have to keep restarting the boiler if/when it does this F22 thing again.

I am a complete halfwit when it comes to anything like boilers etc - heating engineer friend did a lot of explaining to me but I feel like hardly any of it went in and stuck!

Has anyone had this issue, and how was it resolved in the end? Do we need a new boiler?

I'd be so grateful if anyone has any words of wisdom to share! (in words of one syllable please.)

Hi, I thought it meant low water pressure; you can repressurise it yourself by opening the valves for the filling loop
It can gradually drop, but a sudden drop or repeated episodes usually means something that needs fixing.
https://www.aspect.co.uk/blog/vaillant-boiler-f22-fault-code/

Thanks but I think we were told that we don't have the sort of boiler that has a filling loop/vales. It doesn't have a water pressure gauge on it. I believe we have a condensing boiler with a separate hot water tank in the airing cupboard. Maybe I should also add that we had a new pump maybe 1-2 years ago which is apparently working fine. Also we had a new thermostat fitted a week ago today.

The root cause of our F22 was a cracked heat exchanger, British Gas failed to diagnose it, they just kept topping up the pressure and disappearing even introducing a leak sealant at one point. I do not reccomend that you place a plastic bag over the condense drain, turn the boiler off, re pressure the system, wait for 8-12 hours and see if it fills with liquid. I did and got about half a pint which proved it was a cracked heat exchanger, rang Vaillant direct using the number in the manual, yjey despatched an engineer complete with heat exchanger and he had the boiler back in working order in 45 minutes and it never failed again. I suiggest that you do not take out the support contract they will offer, just pay for the once off visit. I understand that Vaillant will send and engineer to do diagnosis as well, but I managed to save that time.

Have you tried googling the make and model of your boiler together with the error code? I did that sort of thing a lot with appliances and usually find some info or a YouTube video to resolve the problem.

My mums house has a condenser type boiler with a hot water tank in the loft, I don’t really understand how it works as I have a combi boiler. However, on mums boiler, the code F22 also meant low water pressure caused by a leak. There was no way to just add water like I do on my combi but the BG engineer crawled all over the house checking radiators and pipes to find the leak. It was actually underneath the floor boards in the void, probably caused by a previous BG engineer who had fitted a new part just a week or so earlier. As some of the pipes were the flexible type, any maintenance carried out near by could cause seals to be broken when the pipes jiggled around, like vibrations travelling some distance.

I have tried googling the make/model + F22 but most of the results are to do with combi boilers. The instances of F22 are getting closer together now! As I said, an engineer is coming on Sunday and I really, really hope they will get to the bottom of this. I get the impression that some engineers are more minded to be thorough than others!

Apologies I did not read that you had posted the make. F22 for British Gas 330 is an indicator that it thinks it is dry, so could be pump blocked or in many cases the cold feed is blocked.

The pump was indeed blocked! The BG engineer looked in it and found some gunk which he removed. Happy to say that boiler is now working exactly as it should.