View Single Post
  #2   Report Post  
Lobster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Nigel Heather wrote:

I have a ground floor radiator that I want to permanently remove and make
good the wall as if it were never there.

I have a modern house so the raditor its attached to a dry cavity wall and
uses 10mm microbore pipes.

I currently considering whether to do the work myself or just pay a plumber
so I recently got a quote and it is this that has raised the questions.

The plumber said two things that seem to contradict each other.

(i) As the radiator in question has a drain valve he said that he could
remove the radiator and then seal the feed and return by just draining that
radiator rather than the whole system.

(ii) The quote includes quite a hefty amount for rust inhibitor.

What I don't understand is

(a) How can you remove a radiator without draining the whole system. Surely
as soon as the feed and return are disconnected water is going to gush from
them especially as this is a ground floor radiator.


Not quite - he'll shut off the supply and return valves at the ends of
the radiator, then remove the radiator, at which point the radiator
contents need collecting in a bowl or something. That leaves the two
radiator tails still sticking up through the floor, which need removing.
That can be done by using a pipe-freezing kit like
http://tinyurl.com/3nhjl, then removing the valves, cutting off the
tails and capping them off below the floor.

Given that it's microbore, he might even do a bit of a bodge and just
squash the piping to block it, rather than freezing the pipes.

(b) If he only needs to drain the radiator itself why do I need all the rust
inhibtor (given the system already has this).


Can anyone shed any light on this - is he telling porkies one way or
another.


If he was replacing the radiator, the existing inhibitor would be
diluted by a proportion equivalent to the volume of the radiator and in
theory, would need topping up. But he's 'forgotten' he's not replacing
the rad, so no more inhibitor is needed. He won't have forgotten the
nice mark-up he will make on the inhibitor though. What was the quote
for that? (Presumably you did tell him you already have inhibitor in?).

Avoiding having to replace the inhibitor is the main benefit of not
draining down the whole system, I would have thought!

He might tell you that you should put new inhibitor in every X years,
and while he's there... but if so, he should flush out the old first!

David