Citrojim's AX, Pixo, C3, Running and Cycling Tales

[Citroening]

Kev how about turning the G into a G load runner i have not seen one yet

Now that's an idea Malcolm... I might have to fire up photoshop at some point...

[CitroJim]

It was funny whilst my joke lasted (fell flat on its face because of the anti-spam filters)

It's a shame when the spam filters take all the fun out of it isn't it Roger I'm not bothered about their primary purpose at all but if they can give you a general all-over energy boost then they might just do some good.. Doctor would never be happy as I'm barred from anything stimulating at all

I might have to fire up photoshop at some point...

Go on Franklin I'd love to see it!

It seems my XM has been far to near my Activa as it's caught Activaitis Just because it has no rams to leak LHM during very cold weather doesn't stop an XM - mine leaks it from the hydraulic pump when the weather is below freezing Today, because it's warmer there's no leak

I see I have a tiny bit of wetness on the autobox filter housing too. I reckon it needs a new O ring when I next change the fluid...

Apart from that, all is good with all cars and nothing to report...

Big news is I actually managed one half-day at work this week Took me until Wednesday to recover from my visit to the land of the sheep, mountains and rain

It would have been two but...

Woke up on Thursday morning to find my house freezing. Central heating had died overnight and there was water running down the wall near the boiler

I have callout cover and called them out. A well-known big company who also supply energy - wish they'd supply the kind of energy I need these days

Anyway, an engineer called in very short time. He looked at the installation and deemed it there and then 'At Risk' and declared it couldn't be used again until fixed I asked that was surely what he was there to do but no, he'd found a problem with the pressure relief outlet being incorrectly terminated and notwithstanding this was not the cause of the fault he could not do anything about the actual fault until the installation error was fixed and that was not something he could do.

To cut a long story short, he could do nothing, despite some pleading on my part and left me stranded, freezing cold with no heating or hot water... It was against his regulations to do anything and besides it needed an installation engineer and he couldn't book one. Even if he could he told me they were stacked out with work and it would be weeks yet before they could do anything...

So, I had to call in an emergency plumber. He attended at the time he said he would and fixed the problem without demur. A joint had come apart between plastic and copper piping due to a manufacturing fault in the coupling. He replaced it and all is now good again.

Cost me an arm and a leg though...

I'm staggered such a big and supposedly caring company could take such an attitude Especially when their motto is 'Caring for your world' or some such weasel words. They didn't care much for mine...

Ahh well. All's well that ends well...

[Citroenmad]

Oh no, an incontinent XM! Lets just hope for warmer weather

I know that feeling well Jim! Our boiler is less reliable than an unreliable thing. We are on first name terns with the engineers!

[myglaren]

Just had mine done too. Leaking like a sieve!

It often conks out for christmas

[Xaccers]

Had our Baxi back boiler serviced, and I think if we owned the house he'd have told us to get it replaced.
As it is, should something major go wrong he said the landlord would have to replace it.
Touch wood it'll behave.

[CitroJim]

If it's old and simple Xac, chances are it'll just go on and on and on... A bit like a 1.9TD Xantia really.. Only problem with them is their appetite for gas.

I've got a super carlos fandango combi boiler here with more electronics in it than a space shuttle. It's incredibly thrifty on gas and will pay for itself quite quickly judging by my gas consumption.

Having reliable heating at reasonable expense is critical for me so I need to get the claimed installation fault fixed so it can go onto cover and thus give me one less thing to worry about if it dies... No way I can fix it if it goes wrong...

[Xaccers]

I'd rather have a combi boiler, some are 98% efficient.
Wish we could replace the fridge and freezer, I'm sure they are the cause of us using 15KWhs a day.

[CitroJim]

I'd rather have a combi boiler, some are 98% efficient.

They are bloody incredible. I believe mine is one of the 98 percenters...

The problem is, replacing a back-boiler with a combi is a major task and not just a simple one-for-one...

Maybe your landlord will be happy to do so. I do hope so for the sake of your fuel bills...

Another advantage of a combi is they can live in odd places. Mine's in the attic and thus it releases space in the living areas of the house...

Trouble is, when they die you loose everything immediately as there's no hot water storage. It's a good idea to have an electric shower with a combi...

[Chris570]

Jim, you know you never have to suffer the cold as there's always somewhere warm not far from you

[CitroJim]

Jim, you know you never have to suffer the cold as there's always somewhere warm not far from you

What? Val you mean?

Failing that, the cars have good heaters in them and if I open the XM sunroof I can always have a shower....

Woke up this morning with an unbelievable amount of energy by my standards. It's been a lovely day so I made the most of it...

Changed the engine oil and filter in the V6 and also changed the gearbox oil as well.

So that's it, the V6 is pretty well set for the winter now

Not doing anything else today. Time to rest. I'm still feeling OK but I'm not going to push it...

I might just go for a joyride in the XM though...

[RichardW]

Glad you got it fixed, Jim - you were lucky that they didn't just tell you it was scrap, and a replacement would be £3k - that is their standard response by all accounts Nothing to stop you doing your own plumbing / gas work of course - the pressures are a lot lower than Citroen hydraulics

It's not being a combi that makes it efficient, rather being condensing - you can have a non-combi condensing boiler - I've got one Just watch where the condensate drain is routed - you don't want a 32mm line outside - it will freeze, and trip the boiler! Under the right conditions you can get some pretty impressive icicles on the flue too - ours is on a north wall, and in the cold spell of Dec 2010, ended up with an icicle about 2ft long, and nearly 4" in diameter at the top - I eventually removed it, in case it blocked the flue!

@Xac - you can get a condensing back boiler these days - but they are fearsomely expensive. The boiler is about twice the price of a std wall hung boiler - and then you have to buy a new twin pipe flue liner - and these are nearly the price of a cheap wall hung boiler.... It will probably keep going though, the one I removed from this house was so crudded up I would have thought it had been in a skip for 6 months if i didn't know it had been in service only a few weeks earlier. Modern boilers like to go through fans and PCBs at an alarming rate - in the fault finding chart in the instructions for mine, there are lots of things that lead to 'replace PCB'.....

[myglaren]

There used to be a government financial incentive to install condensing boilers that went a long way to defraying the extra cost. May still be available.

[Mandrake]

Woke up on Thursday morning to find my house freezing. Central heating had died overnight and there was water running down the wall near the boiler

I have callout cover and called them out. A well-known big company who also supply energy - wish they'd supply the kind of energy I need these days

Anyway, an engineer called in very short time. He looked at the installation and deemed it there and then 'At Risk' and declared it couldn't be used again until fixed I asked that was surely what he was there to do but no, he'd found a problem with the pressure relief outlet being incorrectly terminated and notwithstanding this was not the cause of the fault he could not do anything about the actual fault until the installation error was fixed and that was not something he could do.

To cut a long story short, he could do nothing, despite some pleading on my part and left me stranded, freezing cold with no heating or hot water... It was against his regulations to do anything and besides it needed an installation engineer and he couldn't book one. Even if he could he told me they were stacked out with work and it would be weeks yet before they could do anything...

So, I had to call in an emergency plumber. He attended at the time he said he would and fixed the problem without demur. A joint had come apart between plastic and copper piping due to a manufacturing fault in the coupling. He replaced it and all is now good again.

Cost me an arm and a leg though...

I'm staggered such a big and supposedly caring company could take such an attitude Especially when their motto is 'Caring for your world' or some such weasel words. They didn't care much for mine...

Geeze Jim, what a nightmare.

Reminds me a bit of our combi boiler escapades over the last two years...

I don't know how old it is, but its not exactly new and every time it needs repairs we get the "hmm, we don't carry spares for this old model we'll have to order them in..." routine which means several days with no boiler every time it breaks, inevitably in winter. Of course as a renting tenant we don't have any say in the matter to actually get the boiler replaced with something better so we just have to put up with it...

It actually was reliable when we first moved in but the fan used to make a hell of a din with the whole thing vibrating - me not being used to central heating systems (nobody in NZ uses gas central heating!) I didn't realize it was more noisy than it should be... but at least it worked reliably.

One day it stopped and it turns out the firebox fan had completely seized up, obviously the bearings were knackered for at least a year before that and that's where the noise and vibration was coming from. Well not surprisingly they had no spare part so we went from Thursday to the following Tuesday with no boiler while they ordered a new fan. Being a combi that also meant no hot water and no showers, so plenty of visits to the inlaws.

A couple of guys arrived to fit the new fan who could best be described as groucho and marx and went on their way. As happens on every single visit they never get the cover put back on properly so I refitted the front cover properly and everything seemed fine for a while. The new fan was almost silent compared to the old one - no vibration and almost no noise. Too quiet as it later transpires.

Ever since then the boiler has been a bit intermittent and untrustworthy. Every time it tries to light the flame when cycling on and off there is something like a 1 in 40 chance of it not lighting. When this happens it sits there like a dummy with the circulation pump running, the firebox fan running, but there is no attempt to turn on the gas or ignite the flame. Every time they come back for "maintenance" (which seems to consist of taking the cover off, checking for gas leaks, brushing a bit of dust off and leaving again) we complain but they just shrug and can't/won't do anything about it because its intermittent and it won't do it when they're there. When the problem occurs it has to be manually turned off and on again then it will always fire up.

I'm not 100% certain but I believe the problem is that the air pressure from the much slower replacement fan is only marginal and not quite reliably triggering the air pressure switch in the firebox - so the controller board is turning the fan on, waiting for the air pressure to exceed a threshold before it turns on the gas and strikes the spark. Because the air pressure switch doesn't (sometimes) trigger, it just sits there in that limbo state... If it was my own boiler I would have long ago replaced the fan myself but I can't get them to replace it.

So for more than a year we've been putting up with the house being randomly cold in the morning or after work due to the timer coming on but the boiler deciding not to fire, which is quite infuriating, especially in sub zero temperatures where you don't want pipes to burst.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago and there was a loud BANG which took out all the power in the house except for lights and, yep, it was the boiler tripping the main RCD on the fuse box. Another day off work waiting for the boiler repair man, this time they found that the corner of the main control board had blown up - it was literally a burnt mess in the corner, and the guy traced it to a leaking temperature probe that had been allowing the water to run down the wiring and drip onto the corner of the board.

This guy was actually very competent but you guessed it "sorry we don't have those parts in stock as its an old model", so it was another several days wait over the weekend with no heating or hot water. To prevent any further water leaks he turned off the water supply inlet for the hot water before leaving.

Many days later another guy arrived to fit the parts... well this guy just did not know what he was doing. He had a circuit board and a temperature sensor but had no idea why the temperature sensor was required, I had to explain to him what the previous guy had said about the leak...so he fitted the new board and sensor, put everything back together even as I watched him putting all the screws into all the wrong places and generally looking incompetent... He even put one of the wood screws that was meant for holding our cup shelf (which is attached to the side of the boiler) into the bottom of the boiler - I was waiting for a BANG when the overly long screw touched the circuit board but it didn't! So once the parts were changed he did a very cursory check to see that it turned on and then beat a hasty retreat without even testing the hot water...

Of course I had to then correctly refit the front cover with the correct screws for about the 4th time since we've lived there...and no sooner had he gone that I noticed our hot water wasn't working properly. Luke warm would be the best way to describe it. After 5 days without hot water I didn't fancy phoning them back yet again so I decided to check some things myself, and I realized that the cold water inlet pressure for the hot water was too high, exceeding the flow rate the boiler could heat. A few minutes with the service manual for the boiler and I knew where to check - only problem is the flow rate regulator for the hot water doesn't work!! No change at all through its full range of motion and I can tell from the tap that the pressure is far too high.

Well it turns out that the flow rate regulator must have been faulty for years, and the "fix" to the problem had been that someone had simply partially closed the inlet shutoff valve to drop the pressure which is just a flat headed screw adjustment. The guy who found the water leak had closed the inlet valve completely, the guy that replaced the board simply opened it right up and then left without checking the hot water pressure or temperature... so a bit of fiddling to get that valve adjusted just right and we had decent hot water again.

As the days and weeks went by though I knew something wasn't right. The new control circuit board is completely different to the old one - the old one has lots of relays and lots of discrete logic chips in DIP sockets and so on, the replacement board had one or two surface mount IC's and not a lot else. Obviously the original hard wired logic control board has been replaced with a cheaper microprocessor design with the same inputs and outputs on the board...

Whereas the old one would fire the spark with the gas pressure on low and THEN turn the pressure up after a few seconds, the logic of the new board fires the spark with the gas pressure on full and then turns it down after a few seconds... meaning that you can hear the WOOOOF!!! from the other end of the house, sometimes it sounds like the kitchen is going to blow up or at least knock over the glasses stacked next to it.

Furthermore the intermittent not firing issue seems to be far worse - previously if the flame did not fire due to the low air pressure issue, you could turn the central heating switch on the front of the unit off/on to kick it back into life - or in the case of hot water just turn the tap off and on to reset it. Not so with the new control board. If the flame does not fire for any reason the new control board will get stuck in limbo - you can switch the switch on the front off and on all that you like but it will NOT fire the spark until you have turned the whole thing off at the main switch on the wall for 10 seconds. Whether this is a bug in the control logic implemented in the processor or by design I don't know but its VERY annoying...we're sometimes having to turn it off at the wall 2-3 times a day to keep the heating running... Unless its completely faulty the boiler repair people don't wan't to know about it which is very frustrating.

One final issue that has been dogging us for ages is loss of water in the central heating loop. As far as I can tell there are no leaks in the radiator circuits and the water is being lost past the relief valve. It seems that if I set the pressure when cold to 1 bar (which is not much above the low pressure cutoff) and the central heating is run at max the pressure increase exceeds the pressure relief valve cutoff and thus loses water.

As far as I can see, either the expansion chamber is marginally speced in size or it has lost gas pressure. No chance of trying to get something done about it though...

Things were much simpler when I lived somewhere that didn't need central heating...

[CitroJim]

Gosh Simon, you've certainly got up to speed on combi-boilers very quickly Baptism of fire and all that

Trouble is the average modern condensing combi is so full of electronics that to the average plumber they're a mysterious black box - a bit like ECU and modern cars are to a lot of mechanics!

Your tale makes mine look like a walk in the park...

I know what you mean about a leak and the circuit board. Same happened to my eldest step-daughter in the night. the bang was so loud she was scared to go back in the flat after it happened and was only content when I went round and isolated it for her...

I look at mine now on very frequent occasions to check the pressure is staying steady in the loop and just give it a casual inspection. I'm not fully trusting of them yet.

Finding a good plumber is a bit of a 'mare these days. I used to do all my own and generally now if I'm OK I'll do all I can. Like cars I'd much rather do it myself but mine seems to breaks down now when I can't do what's necessary.

Have you had a chat with your landlord about sorting out a new boiler... It's his problem really...

Cyprus was the best place. No heating needed except for a few short weeks in the middle of winter when an open fire did the job and if a bit of quick heat was needed a portable propane heater was all that was needed. There we even had free hot water from crude solar panels that worked perhaps about 95% of the year.

I had a lovely open fire and always carried a chainsaw in the back of the car; if I saw a good dead tree on my travels I'd fell it and log it there and then, take it home and stash the logs away for winter. Some amazing wildlife lived in the woodshed and one evening I got attacked by an enormous iguana hiding amongst the logs!

In Darwin we had the opposite problem; no heating ever needed but aircon was essential - the aircon units were almost as troublesome as combi-boilers and when Robyn was a baby a failed aircon was a major emergency - as was a failed aircon on the car...

I still reckon the best method of heating a house in the UK is a wood-burning Aga. Nothing to go wrong, it'll burn almost anything, it's always lovely and warm and not only will it drive a few radiators you can also cook on it. Failing a wood burner and a good supply of wood an oil-fired one is the next best bet. Not much to fail there except the glowplug and easily fixed if it does...

One day I'll have a place with an Aga. I love them to bits...

[myglaren]

My son in law has just installed a wood burning stove and is ecstatic about it. Gets all his wood from the port where he works. Has commandeered my chop saw to cut it up into manageable pieces.

These things: kakelugn - were ubiquitous in Sweden and superbly efficient.