Plumbing help

[napalm]

Hi Guys, is anyone on here a plumber / heating engineer? I'm after some advice...

We had three radiators drained and removed so we could get our hallway and living room plastered. Plasterer has done a great job, but myself, not so good. I've just put the rads back on and sealed them all up. I've come to opening all the valves and seems I've probably over tightened everything and it's all made of moon cheese.

My master drain valve bolt has sheared and one of the lockshield valves has done the same. Luckily the drain valve has sheared closed and the sheared lockshield valve is closed too and I've only refilled the rad at the master drain.

As I see it I'm going to need the master drain valve and lock shield valves replaced, but as the drain valve is sheared I can't see a way of draining the system before replacing these.

Is there anything I'm missing that means I can do these without flooding the entire house with black filth? Or will I need to drain the entire system into a jug at the master drain valve by draining the radiator in the messy way there? Am I best off sucking it up and hiring a plumber to do this and hope he can sort it out without ruining our wooden flooring? We could do with getting the heating on quite soon as the house is condensating badly from the new plasterwork...

FYI, if it makes any difference it's a worcester combi boiler on a sealed pressurised system (I think).

Any advice or help to fix my cack-handedness would be massively appreciated.

Cheers

[Conehead]

I know Al (Big_Al_+_Kate) has just finished a course in it. Might be worth giving him a shout.

[Swanny]

Hi Napalm I'm a plumber/heating engineer
You could close the working radiator valve and remove the rad, then if you have the right fittings you could make up a temp drain point using the working rad valve as the drain and running a hosepipe from that. As you are probably well aware your system will be fitted to a high pressure so be careful. It's not a hard job to put it right as long as you have the right fittings, tools and understanding. If you don't have all those then you're better off calling a plumber
Good luck :)

[napalm]

Thanks Conehead.

OK, I needed to deal with this so I approached it in the Dutch fashion. Finger in the dyke and all that. Drained as best I could the messy way. Got Rach to stick her thumb over the inlet as I removed the master drain valve. Water pissing over me, Rach, the newly plastered wall and our nice wooden floor! Never mind, I needed a good shower anyway! Probably about 5 or 6 pints and none of that black sludge came out.
Once I had the drain plug on i could drain the system in the normal way and replace all the valves properly with ptfe and everything. Filled everything up and re-pressurised the system and blow me if I hadn't cross threaded one of my thermostat valves. I officially hate radiators. would rather replace a fuel tank on my blade while smoking a fag and blowing out my birthday cake than have to do this again. Anyway I've isolated that radiator, and bled it to reduce the pressure on the leak.

Tomorrow, start the whole process over again to replace the borked TRV. I'm supposed to be prepping my bike for tuesday's track day not doing this nonsense. God I hate DIY.

I have a whole new respect for plumbobbers. :)

[Swanny]

Oh you did it :)

[napalm]

Thanks for the help Swanny, as you can see I managed to get it sorted, well mostly anyway! It wasn't complicated, but i was definitely learning quickly as I went along, for example, when doing a fast swap of the drain valve, it helps if you have the lock shield bolt closed! Where the feck is all that water coming from??? Oh! Doh!

No harm done, managed to mop up all the spillages and the house appears to be in one piece!

Cheers