How To Pump An Expansion Vessel | What Tools To Use

how to pump an expansion vessel up on a combi boiler and what tools that you might want or you might need things like straighter valve tools to take through the valve out if you're straight above the leaking also got quick release connection for your pump also what type of pump that you can use so you can use battery operated pumps you can also use foot pump which i've got there so i'll show you both different scenarios with that also got an extended lead so obviously if you're going to use a foot pump or a electric pump you might want a longer lead so that you're not struggling with a little shot lead also on some boilers you might need a bent connection as well so again we'll look at that and also i've got a digital um i've not used this before just been just been given this so i'll have a look at that as well that's just for testing shredder valve and testing foot pressure so yeah let's go on with this video [Music] you could actually skip with this it's so long first of all what we'll do just have a quick chat about an expansion vessel and why we're going to pop pump it up um so in your expansion vessel this side of the expansion vessel the side what the schrader valve is on this side this has air in here and the in the middle of it as a as a rubber rubber diaphragm in there and then the other side of that expansion vessel is the central heating water and what happens is as the heating gets warm the hot water in the vessel expands how the hot water in the heating system expands and it needs somewhere for it to expand to so what you notice on a boiler on the pressure gauge on the front of the boiler what you sometimes notice is that when the heating is on the pressure goes right up and sometimes that will go up and it'll go past three bar and it might start dripping outside now this is a common problem when customers say um the boiler's losing pressure and when i get up i've gotta keep topping up all time and this could be it could be down to lack of servicing so a lot of the time when people come into a service to do not top the expansion vessel up which you don't always have to do it but most of the time you do and especially if you go to one for the first time there's a good chance it's never been pumped up so in that case you know you would pump it up so whatever the manufacturers would say normally i mean i've been pumping up for years and i would normally pumping up to about one bar or just under depends on size of the expansion vessel but um you'd need to check with that but as i say that's the reason that we're doing it the reason we're pumping it up is one is to make sure the bottle is working as it should work but also to stop customers having problems so sometimes i see customers on forums and stuff and they'll say well i've never done any boiler service but i've had an expansion vessel changed that's all i've had done well that's because you've not had your bottle service so you're getting repairs done because you're not maintaining it it's a bit like having a car and you know never never servicing it never pumping your tires up or whatever eventually tires might go flat and same with an expansion vessel that's going to get a lot of use because it's moving back and forth all the time so what i'll do now go through go through some of the tools that you can use to pump it up and test it and then i'll show you how to test it and i'll show you some things not to do as well there's some really important things not to do um when you're gonna do it and but yeah we'll go through that shoulder so the first thing we'll look at is a manual foot pump now i've had i have a bike once in the past what what i've used and they've been up they've been up here but the dot tend to they're a little bit awkward you've got to try and get it up and pump this is a special one for gas engineers so this is from out to cares this is their pump and it's just a normal pump but the good thing with this is it's got a really long it's a really long tube on it so you can connect that onto your expansion vessel you can connect it on and then that can be wherever you want then i mean that's reaching to the floor there and there's still loads on it so if you buy the highest up you could still you could still use it and you could pump it up it's also got a digital gauge on this which is really handy so you better pump it with that i'd always advise you have a manual pump in your van regardless like this um and then you can also use you can use a pump where you've got a battery like that problems with this is sometimes your battery might go flat obviously you have to make sure you charged it also on this one the tube on it's really short so if you're going to use something like that you might want to get one of these extended hoses and then you can just put your extended hose onto it like that and then that'll just make it a little bit easier and a little bit easier to use also with these it's got a quick release on it so you're not um like sometimes when you do boxes and stuff it's hard to unscrew it and get it off right quick with these you can just go and it's done and you're not losing any pressure out of it so they're just two other types of pumps you could use if you could put put a comment below and let me know what type of pump you're using at the minute that would be really helpful another thing that i've got and i'll try and put i'll see if i can find some links to all different ones of these um but you can also get a bent i've actually got this um i got this on the backseat training course probably about 10 years ago um yeah so bent one that fits inside boxes really easy on older boxes a lot of newer boilers now they'll have a threaded valve up front or they'll love them up top so the alpha that alpha's got on top backs his ground on top so it just makes it easier for you to get to on ideal it's going on front on logic it's on front over on vogue so that they're easy to work on and then we've got a digital pressure gauge again as i said this is the first time i've seen this today but if you didn't want to pump it up you could just check it maybe with digital pressure gauge before you start and you can see what pressure is before you do it with it one thing that's really good and the the pennies i mean they're really cheap i think these are about 1.50 or 2 quid really really cheap might be a little bit more expensive if you get it with which thread of all so you can get you can get spare valves and spare threader valves so if one of these will pass in so i've had a few on vogues that have been passing that's only because i do i've installed quite a few vlogs so i probably serviced more bugs than other boilers uh vlogs and logics but that just unscrews out then and you could clean that off and put it back in if you wanted to but notice on that then no air come out of there i've not i've not actually taken i'm not taking the pressure out on that which is uh so really it should have had should have got some pressure in so whatever services in the past might not have pumped expansion vessel up so that that's just about it with with what tools um what i'll do now we'll have a look at one of the absolutely do not do's is do not take the pressure of the boiler of the blow off with the prv um what can happen is if you do do that essentially in water normally has some muck some bits of grit in it and if you open the prv the pressure relief valve you can get a bit of grit in there and it might not seal very well so if you do start messing with that you're probably gonna have to take it all out clean it all off um and then put it back together or even put a new one in so personally i don't i wouldn't normally use the pressure relief valve to drain the boiler but what we're going to do now we're going to go through pumping the expansion vessel up what we do sort of step by step um one of the things when you pump an expansion vessel up you need to make sure there's no pressure on the other side of the expansion vessel so on the water side you don't know pressure on it so what you need to do we need to drain the boiler down now there's a few ways that you can do this you on more spoilers there'll be a drain on the boiler so on the boxes there's a drain on it worcester's the worsted drain is amazing probably one of the best um boilers for draining down because the the outlet on it is massive you can put a big full hose on it um which is really good but what we need to do we need to get the water out but also depending on the boiler so for instance with a washer again the valves underneath on the wooster are normally quite good so if you isolate the boiler you isolate the flow return on the boiler and then you drain the boiler down and then as you pump in the expansion vessel up which we'll do shortly but as you're pumping the expansion vessel up you'll notice some water will start coming out so for instance if it were to worcester here you had to drain here and it would go into a bucket you started pumping this expansion vessel up then you'll notice some more water will come out and that'll be just some water that's in here um and it'll come out and come into your bucket and then you you need to sort of leave it then for a few minutes well a minute or 30 seconds or whatever just to like um just to let it settle and then pump it back up again to the pressure that you wanted it to be depending on the manufacturers depending on the boiler like i said as a rule personally myself and i know some people say oh no you don't do it like that but i just do it about one bar across all the boilers because then i know that and i i've never personally had an issue with that i've never gone back a year after there's been an issue because i've done it to one bar some people will say oh no you do it to point uh not 0.9 um i think it's 0.6 plus the head and then you have to start working out but the way i see it is if you keep it simple keep it simple stupid in it so that that's what the same dollar um so if you keep it simple then you know when you go to a house you're just doing them all similar but as i say always check with manufacturers on that check what the manufacturers require and if you've got any comments on that please put comments below um but yeah let's get it get into this now and i'll show you how to pump it up so the first bottle that i'm going to show you is a boxy platinum so same as your boxy duotechs and some patterns and main boilers as well so i've turned the mains off to the boiler obviously we've done all our electrical checks that we would tb118 so what i would do then is i would close the flow and return valves you've got to be a little bit careful with these if they're quite old you might just want to take the pressure out of the system and not not touch the valves so just for you to be aware of if it's a newish boiler then it should be okay and it'll be under warranty if they did leak so that this is on and then that's to turn it off and also on this one because we've got filter on i'm to isolate the filter the valve on the filter so i've only turned off the floor and the return on the filter and then i can use the filter then to drain the system down so you can see here on this i'm going to take a sample at the same time because i'm going to do a water test with any project as always you should only go into the combustion case if you guess if registered and competent to do so this red bit here that's the expansion vessel and to get to the expansion vessel i take out the spark generator and just turn the gutter round out of the way and it just makes it easier to get into you can bend the gutter down i've seen somebody do but i don't do that just take spot generator out and then you can just easily get into this then you can just get touch reader valve onto top expansion vessel and it's and it's a lot easier and then what we've got we've got the bent connector which which i've already shown you earlier and then we just screw that onto the expansion vessel and then we would pump the expansion vessel up to whatever we require and as i say we'd leave it a little bit and make sure that it is is that the pressure you want it to be and then you just spray the shredder bar afterwards because often the biggest cause i would say is leaking through the valves so you can just replace that spreader valve sometimes you will see on boxes that often they leave that bent connector on and that's because they don't want to put a new expansion vessel in and once you pump your expansion vessel up all you're going to do then is turn the valves back on and then obviously you're going to refill the system getting the air out that you can i will add the link below to some of these products if you use a particular product a particular pump or any type of characters like these then please put a comment below let me know what you use that'd be really useful what we'll do now we did a video recently with viva training academy with roy from viva training academy and roy takes the expansion vessel out absolutely one of these at one of these boilers and it puts it on and tests it and shows you how to test pressure switches and it's really useful so what i'm going to do i'm going to add it on to end of this video so hopefully this video then will give you a full uh broad view and knowledge of expansion vessels um yeah so yeah let's go over to let's go over to viva training academy gas training how an expansion vessel works my name's alan hart and today i'm at viva training academy and we've got roy who ray is a trainer here and he's been a trainer for many years i've been on many of rice training courses myself and he's an amazing trainer and roy's going to go through how an expansion vessel works so most of us know by now from the videos we've done previously is an expansion vessel is used in a boiler because when water gets hot water expands at four percent and we need something on the system to take up the expansion so that's what an expansion vessel does in the system and roy's going to go through um testing um like it's got pressure sensor on here there's different types of sensors and he's also going to explain to us about expansion missiles so without further ado let's go over to roy thanks alan hi guys it's roy fuegler here at viva training academy over in halifax again and today we're going to have a look at expansion vessels and expansion wrestling in a boiler so this is a little ring so just to explain a bit about this rig so an expansion vessel is in two halves so you've got section there that's got air that comes out the factory and that's got an air charge in there and we can top that air charge up and on a service visit we should really be checking that air chart some manufacturers say we should check it every service and some say as and when necessary but i'll come back on to that the other side of it the back side of it that's got water in it as you can see on my rig it's connected into the pipe work there and i've got one or two little things so this is just a simulation so i'm here i've also got a low pressure cut off switch and that's there so if the boiler loses pressure it doesn't fire up dry so it doesn't burp it doesn't boil itself it doesn't damage itself and up here i've got a pressure sensor some manufacturers are using low pressure cut off switches some manufacturers are using pressure sensors so inside there there's a diaphragm running down the middle and that's separating the air pressure from the water pressure so these come out the factory in the boilers typically set at a particular pressure somewhere between point eight and one bar now an expansion vessel will have a dare to play it on there that data plate will give you lots of useful information it will give you that pressure that comes out the factory sector so i've just put my glasses on so i can see what i'm i'm reading so this particular one on here it explains its charge pressure is point eight to the bar so just below one bar it's literally 10 liters so that's a 10 litre expansion vessel its maximum pressure is 3 bar so that fits in with things like your pressure relief valve that's a maximum of 3 bar so if the pressure does get too much that will start to drip so relieving pressure and then it's test pressure it's tested up to 4.3 bar its temperature range is plus 90 minus 10 so we don't really want them at -10 because it's frozen so i've got a gauge on here and it's set to 0.8 round about 0.8 of the bar so that's as if this one's coming out the factory now we don't want any water in here so what i'm going to do is simulate the water pressure by using air so i've got my raging pump here so this is just as if we've hung this boiler on the wall it's brand new that expansion vessel's come out the factory it's got air pressure in there so we're going to put some water pressure in now typically when i was installing boilers back in the day i used to charge my boilers up with water up to about 1.2 bar so i'm going to put around about 1.2 bar into the water side of it so i'm just going to pump this up now what you'll notice is i'm putting the charge in there the air which is simulating the water the pressure on the air side is actually going up because that water pressure is pushing against that diaphragm which is starting to equalize the pressures so as i get my 1.2 bar in there and i'm just about there now what we'll notice is that my air side of the expansion vessel is at 1.2 and my water sides at 1.2 so they've equalized we'll also notice that my low pressure cut off switch which is basically a switch all it's there to do if there's no pressure in it or less than half about it goes open circuit so we can test it on a beep test so i'm just going to get me multimeter test and pop it across the two connections there so what we'll notice we've got a beep so we know that that's operating now this sort of pressure sensor that's got three connections because it only measures lower pressure it measures high pressure so if i go across a couple of connections on there i've got a reading on that one and i'll move it around to the ohm scale 5.13 kilo arms so i can tell i've got some pressure in there so i'm just going to do now i'm going to drop the pressure out of it so what you'll see is this one will come down and that one so it's as if i'm draining the boiler down i'm taking all the water pressure out of it so the air pressure's coming down as well because we're taking that pressure away so we've got down there below that half of that so if i just check these two sensors again so i'm still getting roughly 1.5 on that side if i check the other side i'm getting 5.8 on the beat test nothing because it's gone below the pressure so what we're going to do now is simulate you guys coming along on the service visit and there's no pressure in this side so i'm just going to drain the pressure out of it so all i'm doing is just letting the air out out through this rail so i took the pressure off there and as you can see it's going down now one of the problems that we can get with expansion vessels they can get dirt in them a lot of older systems before we started flushing before we started putting filters in there they used to get blockages so one of the problems that we can get is a blockage now i'm going to simulate a blockage just by turning this little blue tap off so my expansion vessel is not going to be part of my circuit so i'm just going to turn that off so i've come along the expansion vessel i've got no pressure in my boiler has lost all its pressure as well so i'm going to put the expansion vessel up so i'm getting my pump again onto this back valve and i'm going to pump this up now generally when i used to pump expansion vessels up i'd usually put them to about a bar because when you're taking that pump off it'll always lose a little bit of air pressure so i'm just going to pump that up to about so this is my exercise but today just about the bar pop him off and he stayed at about the water side hasn't done anything so i'm now going to pump that water side up as you can see very very quickly that pressure's left right up there it's left right up so i've got about one and a half bar in there now now what would happen is that that's called so when we put the boiler on the temperature rises and that expands so what's going to happen there [Music] it's going to very quickly as it heats up go over too bad and that's because it's not communicating by the air charge the air charge is just sat there and it's still on one bar so the boiler starts to drip and it leaks out and then it drops the pressure down so the customer comes along turns the filling loop on and it's a vicious circle of repressurizing losing pressure re-pressurising losing pressure so we're going to come along as an engineer we've got a customer complaining it's dripping out the prv so the first thing we notice is that the pressure's right up we've got water dripping out there so we're going to drain that down so we drain that down before we do anything else always take out the air pressure because we may come along now and we check it with a pump and we're still going to get just over a bar on the air side so we might think oh the expansion vessel is fine it's got a charge in there but we're not communicating that charge what we need to do is to take it and clean it out but if we don't take that charge out there what may happen is that you've got a one bar of pressure behind the diaphragm inside the other side of it you've got dirty water you won't do any connections and the next thing that's going to happen is you're going to get a jet of dirty water either down you or all over your customer and the kitchen all the cylinder cupboard wherever the boiler is so we always before we start removing expansion vessels just make sure we take any charge out of the air side that way when we do it undo any joints any connections if it's after the blockage we're not going to flood the house we're not going to get dirty water splashing all over so once we get the pressure down to zero then we can start on doing connections we can start trying to find out where the blockage is now a lot of these expansion vessels are fitted on thin flexible hoses with tight bends on them that's usually a favorite place to find and that's where where dirt can sit can cause issues and that's where it can block up so it's always worth checking the expansion vessel particularly if you're getting complaints and comments about dripping out the prv the other thing it might be worth depending on the cost of a new prv replacing that because if it's been dripping for a while there's a good chance there could be a bit of dirt on that ct and so that's just a quick one on expansion vessels what to look for what to check how to test them hopefully you're not going to flood anybody's house or get dirty water down yourself and if you've got any questions any comments please put them down below if there's any future videos you'd like us to do any other information you'd like please please let us know and so that's been me roy fuegler at the viva training academy over in halifax saying thanks very much for watching until next time bye-bye thank you very much for that roy and once again thank you to viva training academy who's putting a lot of time and effort into hopefully helping new recruits even people that's been doing job a long time to be honest i i always learn um i always pick up some tips when i'm doing these type of videos so you know it's all good and so yeah thank you to roy thank you to me with training academy and if you've got any questions please put them in the comments below and one thing i will say is always refer to the manufacturer's instructions because things change and manufacturers sometimes change things they sometimes have technical bulletins where they might tell you something different to what previously said so always check and always refer to the installation instructions thanks for watching

Channel: Allen Hart

Views: 39,448

Keywords: expansion vessel, how to recharge an expansion vessel, combi boiler, boiler repair, expansion vessel recharge, expansion vessel combi boiler, expansion vessel pressure how to check, expansion vessel how it works, expansion vessel replacement, combination boiler, expansion vessel installation, expansion vessel pump, expansion vessel leaking water, expansion vessels explained

Id: KOtCQf2AxeE

Length: 29min 2sec (1742 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022