The life of a jobbing plumber #23

[Music] a YouTube expiry back for another life of a job in plumber now I just got apologized last week I was a bit down about things I was questioning wherever it was worth all the effort and time I was pointing to make these just because a few negative comments just got to me and got me a bit down but I've had so many messages from people telling me I'm doing a great job telling me how much you like these videos so I'm gonna carry on you'll notice that at the start now I've put a disclaimer on just so I don't have to explain every time that if I do something gas related or something really you would only normally get tradesmen for it's not for DIY it's not me trying to tell people how to do it and encourage people to do their own work this is just for apprentices people new to the trade you want to pick up a few tips or just people aren't interested in what plumbers gas engineers do in a normal day so there's a disclaimer there just to say if you see me do anything gas related or anything at all plumbing related it's not for you to copy me if you're not qualified to do so if you're not competent to do so so just a bit of a disclaimer to cover me and hopefully I can carry on so this week few gas jobs few central heating jobs boiler repairs just a mix of wive done this week I've managed to get a van vault never fought to be able to fit one in but fitted of um volume I'm really pleased that there's a tiny little video on that um but yeah just business as usual really so thank you to everyone for the kind messages we're gonna kick off this week with the winner of the apprentice toolkit now if you didn't see I was giving away a full toolkit to an apprentice so then with the winner of that I did a short video which went on Twitter and Instagram so just included that just so you guys know who won it he's named Seamus from Norwich young guy 19 years old really impressed me with his entry so he's wonderful toolkit if you didn't win and you entered don't be discouraged just loads of giveaway he's still got to announce the winner of my Magna claims unit that'll come in next week's video and then if you follow me on Instagram and Twitter I'm always giving stuff away so yeah check it out thanks for watching thanks for your support here it is hey guys PB moment of truth it's the announcement of the winner of this year's apprentice toolkit giveaway now I had well over 300 entries this year so thank you to everyone who entered I love reading for all mall unfortunately though I can only pick one winner so the guy who has won the full Apprentice toolkit this year is Sheamus table from Norwich he's a level 2 plumbing student I was really impressed with his entry he seems really keen sent me lots of pictures of his work and just yeah really impressed me so well done Sheamus all this kits on its way to you hopefully you keep in touch put these tools to good use and I look forward to watching your career progress and just a final thank you to all the sponsors you do an aid kit and everyone for entering thanks for your support and tune in next year for next year's giveaway you so today we're going to be replacing a couple of parts on this boxy 105 II so the ball is in the air income and you can see there it's absolutely full of towels and stuff of took half the stuff out that was around the boil up around the bed this top towel is mine and then I've got bucket underneath the boiler to catch any drips so this is a box of 185 e now the this is one of my favourite boilers to work on we used to fit hundreds of these a group girl cut my teeth fit in backseat boilers so I know my way around them whenever I open a boiler cupboard door or get to a job and it's the back so I feel a little bit happy inside because I know I'm probably gonna be able to fix it so the issue with this is they've got hot water problems so the hot water basically isn't working properly and we're swapping this plate heat exchanger at the back and also the temperature sensor thermistor there so if you don't know how a plate heat exchanger works or how a combi heats up most comedy's heat or hot water it's through this play heat exchanger in the back so I've got the new one in the box here I've never seen one of these before so I've got two circuits the bottom circuit and the top circuit and you can see they're inside the sort of light really fine together plates and they run all the way along the the you can get bigger ones you can get thinner ones depending on the output of the boiler but this is the one specific for this model bore light now you can see they're the sort of screwed happens that stand out proud for different on each side so you got one there that's in line with the holes and one there that's offset that's to ensure that you can't get it in the wrong way around so for those who don't know how this works I'm going to try my best to explain it as simple as possible so the top half is a circuit within the boiler like that which gets pumped around so when you draw the tap the boiler fires up and just pumps the heat around that top half and then the cold water comes in from the bottom on the right hand side then comes out the and it picks up any heat that's in that plate heat exchanger to give you hot water at the top and all the boiler knows it's doing is running through that top circuit on the pump now to work on it we've got to drain it down so just a quick tip never drain the water down from its POV that's not what it's there for so don't don't do that you've got normally on a boiler a special drain point on this one it's that white tap there it's just a bit too tight for me to get my hands in so I'm just going to take the tension off with a pair of grips so just didn't do that and you can drain the contents of the boiler if you boil it downstairs you will have to isolate the boiler on the valves underneath but as this boards upstairs it's the highest point in the system I've not got to turn anything else off I can just open that up and drain it either through a hose pilot underneath so once you've turned it down you're happy remove the two screws left the right and that releases the plate heat exchanger from the back of the hydraulic block okay so once the screws are out now you've got to get it out and you can see there there's a lot of stuff in front of it and you think bloody hell it's at the back and everything get to it you just got a work out on some boilers yeah you can get them out pretty easy this one's nice easy one but you will have to probably remove one or two parts some boilers it might be the gas valve it might be the diverter valve motor yeah you being at the back I mean there are some boys like valent boilers some of the newer glowworms there at the front but a lot of the time in the backs he's got work out of room that you're gonna so I can get my arm in there now to copy the exchanger and it just pulls away because it took the screws out there will be a little bit water left in it just drain that into you book it and then being careful because the edges are razor sharp on these so just be careful not to cut your hand but choose the best route to get it out sometimes you have side panel off gas valve out to make your life easier do what you gotta do but if you look you'll get a nice easy one like that so you can see there the bottom circuit is nice and clear because that's the way you fresh cold water comes in if these are gonna get blocked it's coming you in a hard water air and you're gonna get limescale and stuff like that in but it's the top one is the one there gets blocked because that system water so basically when you get in black sludge in your radiators and your path flushing your radios you think about that it's the same water that's running for you play heat exchanger and the waterways are so tightly compact and small that they get blocked easily if it gets blocked when the boilers running through it as a circuit it gets too hot when it gets too hot you boiler will overheat and shut down so the main symptoms of blocked heat exchanger are if your boiler shuts down while you're drawing hot water off it's gonna get cold so when you're drawing hot water it will get red hot the boiler will overheat and shut down you're still drawing hot water the plate heat exchanger cools down because the boilers stopped firing so your wall go lukewarm to cold the boiler will cool down and then kick back in again so then your wok will start to get warm again then it will get red hot and then the boiler will cut off and it will get cold again so that's the most typical diagnosis of a block plate heat exchanger just a quick tip with any of your new guys if your fitting any spare on a boiler before you start trying to fit it just check it looks something like the old one if it looks completely different then you might have the wrong part sometimes they change them a little bit and they look slightly different and you know you'll get a good idea so the way this plate heat exchanger attaches to the boiler is you got four flat faces there with the openings and we have rubber seals that go on between the plate heat exchanger and the brass hole and tronic block there get new seals with your new heat exchanger and some new screws as well which I advise you always use so now we've got to try and get these rubbers out of their housings in the back of the brass block there you can either try to get your finger in a flip them out or sometimes they'll be in with a bit of scale you'll need a tool to pop them out just pop one out now just show you it there's the old one it's quite a bit firm so we'll be swapping all of those when you swap them all plenty of silicon grease around the faces to make sure they're water tight show you here just get a screwdriver so sometimes it's just easier just to use a tool just pop in and then pin them out on any boiler spare I I fit work on new o-rings new seals silicon grease prevents things from dripping doctor do the job enough to do it again assistant is weeping you can't stop it there's now ready to put the new plate heat exchanger in remembering to get the getting in the right way just be really careful of those sharp edges it's normally just about there bit sharp and cut yourself so that hopefully should just drop in when you put this in when you go by the o-rings you just fit just be careful that are those screw points that stick out don't Kuan Yew washes aft on that before a few times so we filled up now I'm just going to fire the boil up on hot water early and show you how this works using the filler thermal imaging camera so if you look on the left hand side there the flow pipes just starting to get warm and that's going through the top half of the plate heat exchanger but you can see the whole of that heat exchanger getting hot and then through behind the pump and up on the return pipe which is just starting to get warm now so that's our circuit or loop if you will on the top half of the plate heat exchanger running inside the boiler and we can just see from the thermal imaging that that's working right so you've got the flow pipe there on the left goes through the diverter valve there into the top half of the page into exchanger out through the pump and then back up into the main heat exchange they're said we know that's working then if we look underneath the boiler we can see four pipe from the left is the cold going in and then the second part from the left is the hot coming out so we know that that's working correctly we can also use the Fleur for fault-finding if there was something else going on with these pipes which I try to explain to you now so I've put the central heating on you can see that the flow on the left and return on the right I've now got hot for an example if you run the hot tap and this flow pipe started to get hot you could diagnose a diverter valve fault because there's no way the heat should be going down there while you're drawing the hot tap if you've not got the heating on or if your return was cold but your flow was absolutely red-hot you'd look at possibly a blockage on the return maybe somewhere in the filter going back to the boiler just another good thing that I like about the Fleur 4 fault find him and for those of you that don't know what the inside of a plate heat exchanger looks like I made this little quick video after the job where I cut one in half so you can see they're all the tight compact waterways interweave in between each other they are separated down the middle so you've got the top off in the bottom off and you can see there this is the one we took out of the boiler the bottom half is clear the top off is the blocked off which is why we have problems with this boiler so this is I'm just a safety certificate I'm checking the cook-off for the certificate and the burner on this the smallest burger on the hob isn't the flames not correct it's not big enough so that's maximum there and it doesn't change between minimum and maximum so it could be a number of things but my number one guess would be that the injectors blocked so this is what I'm gonna do put the top off and you can see in there the injector in the middle but there's a lot of debris around it so something's I have a fell in there or it's got blocked and a which which can happen a lot so I keep some bits of kit on the bag to do this so we're gonna need which pockets these room got a little them set a needle there and then we're gonna need a socket set today injector out the middle okay so got seven mil socket and the extension bar in to get us down into that let's just turn out now so that's just screwed out there we can see into the into the gas pie so on this injector there's a hole in the less the gas through so why normally do is do the same on pilot ice just hold it up to the light you can't really see through there's a tiny little hole that you can just about make it out so either using my needles or a can of air dust our we're gonna clean that out now the other thing I do is whip that out just turn the gas on on your ring and I blow through any disease every all available side landing near my screwdriver just blast some gas through just to clear that out now I'll show you this injector see there the holes much bigger now that I've cleaned out that's why it was blocked and not letting off gas through and put it all back together and test it you can see there the flames much improved last maximum setting now and that's minimal so just a blocked injector on one buzz they could be a number of things but I just thought I'd show you that guy's PB just a quick video to show you the installation of my new van volt slider now space is a premium in the van and I was unsure whether I was gonna get this in but Bob have developed a prototype kit to modify the floor height to allow you to get a van vaal the slider in and I'm just trying it out for them so you can see there I've raised the floor just enough to get the van vaal a slider in it's quite a snug fit its bolted to the floor to the side frame and to the floor above it 1200 deep 500 wide and it's surprising how compact Anita is but you can get so much kit in it it's such a big draw but don't take up any extra space so I'm really pleased with it it's really robust nice little unit and the best thing is you can put your really valuable kit in there lock it up and have yourself a good night's sleep right guys this is just a quick job fit the thermostatic radiator valves this radiator customers requested because they can't regulate the temperature this is on the landing upstairs so we've drained the system from downstairs release the air to let the water drain out and then we can work on the radiator now most TR B's you buy these days will be bi-directional multi-directional t RVs the ones I use the danfoss valves bi-directional but you can set the flow on the actual TR v what that means is you need to know which pipe the left one or the right one is the flow and then you set the thermostatic valve accordingly now the easiest way to check this is to put the heating on put your hand on the pipe feel which one gets hot first and you'll know that that's the flower return you can see that on the t RV there's the little arrow what we can set the flow to as I say the ones you buy there might be bi-directional you don't have to change anything so the trouble we have in the heating on is the rods going to be thought to work on so I've done this from cold this thermal imaging is after I've fitted the T RV and you can see there when I put the heating on with the thermal-imaging camera the heats coming through the right hand pipe which is the one that's still got the lock shield on so then what we do on the T RV is we check the arrow and we set it to run in line with the return if it was the opposite way around we just turn that around and change the arrow this reduces system noise and ensures the thermostatic radiator valve does its job now as I said before putting your hand on is fine but if you're doing that before the job or after the job and you've not got our multi directional valve you can afford rain down and start again so it's worth noting just just something to check when you're doing T RVs the direction of the flow midterm before you do the job or make sure you've got a bio directional valve you let's try this one again so this is a gas escape I was called out to put tightness test time you can see there the pressures dropping so that's the first thing we check as gas engineers do a tightness test to see if there's any kind of pressure drop if there is then we know we've got an escape somewhere we can go to try and find it so I'm just going to show you two of the tools we use to try and find gas escapes now there's two things we can do we can use leak detector well can use this pen leak son's pen now we'll stop with the lead sets because it's the easiest thing the most common thing I would check would probably be I don't know this connection here or on the pipe work one of the solder connections if there's one one I thought looks a bit dodgy we'll just check them already so go start on start here now I've already done this before I started filming and I'm just gonna show you so we've delete protective spray for an example we spray it on the fit in there now if this was leaking so it's just turn it touch zoom in you see it started to bubble so if you trying to find a gas leak we've leaped east had to spray so I guess escape and you spray a fit in or a join and he starts pulling out that's where your leak is so we'll just close up back off so normally you would spray it by that and nothing would happen if it was tight if it was leaking you won't start to bubble I know then I'll show you the pen this is me by Kane I don't think they made this anymore but they do loads of different gas sniffers I very rarely use this super moist so the way we do this pop outside into the fresh air and we turn it on let me see that start doing a very slow audible beep and we've got the green neon on so so far we're not picking anything up with this so try it on the Union ear so if we just crack it again there's some dust coming out he's proof of this Maya you move away starts to calm down then we're back to normal don't hear the gas so don't use this very often and I normally just do drop tests and then easily oh you have to find the source of the leak but it's just another tool probably about 50 60 quid for it a week sentence pen or leaks lead detective loads of different companies make a man Tom Kane test out this pipe here is the gas pipe for the boiler so using the pen if we get anywhere near where the gas escapes clean you can see that starts to dilute menthol so see that start to slow down again so somewhere around that sake it's my tissue but it could be down here it could be rising up or it could be a little bit in fact it starts going crazy they're probably on this elbow and so I say don't use that very often but it's good indicator of the roof area of where your escape is so then we'll use the spray we'll just test this elbow if you see that straightaway if you can see that bubbling on the elbow there so that's telling us that's where we're losing gas which we we located it with the pen well first of all we confirmed there was a gas escape with the tightness test and then we located the general area with the pen and we've confirmed it with the ODF so we're going to remove this elbow now redo it hi guys Phoebe would you rather Wednesday okay would you rather every job you go to for the next day you cannot park outside you'll drive around for ages looking for a space in the end you can't park anywhere near the job so you got a druggie kit all the way down the street into the job or the same day every single job is the top floor flat the lifts are broken you got a look or you can't up to the top floor or would you rather be able to park right outside every single job but none of your jobs get finished Ivor there's a part needs ordering something's not in stock for whatever reason you graphed all day but you don't feel like you've got anything done because none ejobs are completed what would you rather do [Music]

Channel: P B Plumber

Views: 33,596

Rating: 4.9079285 out of 5

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Id: FC1mM0nFM4s

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 27 2018