Emergency Boiler Repair in Meopham & Southfleet (DA13)

The 2021 Census put 2,459 households here in detached houses, 43% of the district and the highest share of the eighteen. Detached houses are the likeliest to have kept a hot water cylinder, fed by a system or regular boiler rather than a combi. Where a house in Meopham, Istead Rise, Vigo or Southfleet runs that way, the boiler never decides for itself where its heat goes.

Motorised valves decide, and they can fail while the boiler is fine.

Oil, at 7% of households, and tank or bottled gas, at 3%, are both commoner here than in any other DA district, and the valves on this page work the same whatever the boiler burns.

Motorised zone valves on cylinder systems

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With a cylinder in the house, the water the boiler heats has two places to go: round the radiators, or through a coil inside the cylinder that heats the water for the taps. Motorised valves open and shut those routes. You find them in the pipework, often in the airing cupboard beside the cylinder or close to the boiler: a brass body in the pipe with a boxed head on top and a wire running away from it. Some systems have a pair of two-port valves, one for each circuit, and some have a single three-port valve that opens to either side or sits midway to feed both. Each valve has an electric head on top, run from the programmer and the thermostats, and inside the head is a switch. When the valve opens, that switch is what tells the boiler a circuit wants heat. So a valve that no longer opens leaves its circuit cold, and the boiler may not even be asked to fire for it, while the other circuit carries on as normal. Hot water and cold radiators, or warm rooms and a cold tap, and the boiler may show no fault at all, because from where it sits nothing has gone wrong. A larger house may have more than one heating valve as well, each serving its own part of the house, and the circuit behind whichever one has failed is the one that stays cold. The heads run on mains voltage, which is why they are an engineer’s job and not a weekend one.

Leave the lever on the valve head alone, whatever you have read.

Everything that tells the valves what to do is yours to check. Look at the programmer and make sure the circuit that has gone cold is switched on, or inside an on period, and turn the room thermostat up past the temperature of the room.

Then find the cylinder thermostat and check its dial.

It is normally a small dial on the side of the cylinder, and easy to knock. Worcester puts room and cylinder thermostats set too low on its list of things to rule out before calling anyone. If all of that is right and one circuit is still cold, ring and tell us which one.

At the house, the engineer calls each circuit on its own and checks two things: that the valve opens, and that the boiler is then told to fire. That separates a failed head from a fault in the controls behind it. Resideo sells the head and the motor for its three-port valve as separate spares, so a failed head does not always mean cutting the valve out of the pipework.

A failed zone valve sits outside the boiler and says nothing about its health, but if boiler, cylinder and controls are all of an age and you are thinking of changing the lot, we also arrange boiler installations, system and regular as well as combis.