Hot water/central heating help please!

[apatheticfallacy]

When we bought this house we soon realised that the hot water and central heating were permanently on, despite adjusting the control panel. We were a bit annoyed as we'd specifically asked the vendors if they knew of any problems with the heating/hot water system and they said no. We took advantage of the offer of a free boiler service that our mortgage company offered us and my DH showed the boiler man around whilst I was out. He showed the boiler man the problem who showed DH some kind of manual override switch and kindly switched our central heating off for us. At the time DH said 'it's easy, there are two switches at the back'

Now it's getting colder it won't be too long before we start to think about turning it back on but of course DH has completely forgotten this ever took place!

I've had a look and the only two switches on the back of things I can see are on little silver boxes labelled 'motorised valve normally closed'. Does anyone know if this could be the magic switch? Will the boiler explode if I switch them?

We don't have much spare cash to get the problem fixed at the moment but that should change shortly so was planning to deal with the semi-working system until then. However, if the underlying problem sounds cheap and easy to fix I'd obviously orefer that.

Can any clever person advise me?

At least the laundry will dry...

I think you will have to turn the rads off at their knobs. Or turn the knob on the boiler itself to zero. There should also be fused electrical switch on the wall near the boiler that you could turn off.

Inside the metal case on the valve is a switch, that turns the boiler on when the motor (controlled by the timer and thermostat) has turned the valve to the "on" position. It sounds like yours has got stuck "on" and is ignoring the thermostat and timer.

The motorised head can be swapped for a new one, it is detachable. There are five wires that need to be put into the right terminals, there is probably a grey plastic connections box nearby. I would suggest calling a heating engineer and describing it. If you say you have a Honeywell two-port valve he may well keep the part in stock.

It's still possible you have a wiring fault, but I think now that is unlikely.

You could try jiggling the lever in case you can get the switch to go off.

Turning the room thermostat down seems to have turned the heating off. If I turn it up again the boiler turns on. But it shouldn't because the heating switch on the control panel is set to off.

Does this mean the fault is with the control panel itself?

DH is working late tonight, I fear I'll have no one to listen to my whirring box () until tomorrow night and the conundrum is going to toeture me.

Pipes on both sides of the boxes feel warmish but I'd only just managed to get the heating off again. I'll let things cool down and have another grope in the cupboard.

could be a wiring error then.

p.s.

Is there any sign that the thermostat has been altered, eg. by the previous occupiers?

Modern room stars are programmable and contain their own timers. The one in your pic is a simple older type.

You know a wiring error is a very familiar problem in this house. Our ring main wasn't actually a ring, when my (sparky) dad tried to take a spur off the ring for us he discovered that someone had 'joined up' visible bits of the ring between sockets to make the wiring look correct at first glance but it wasn't actually connected at all. So poor old dads little job turned into a much bigger one! It had been done with the white professional wiring and not the grey stuff so either a really dodgy electrician or an amateur who'd got hold of the proper wiring from somewhere. There are lots of similar examples of dodgy electrical work - box style sockets with big holes cut in the bottom because they hadn't fed the flex through the proper hole before connecting it up etc etc.

No clear evidence that the thermostat has been tampered with, but I wouldn't be surprised.