A central heating system is designed to keep your home warm all winter. In summer though, you won’t be needing it. How do you ensure your underfloor heating system or radiators are ready to go when winter comes back around?
As a general rule, you don’t need to turn the boiler off. You can control the heating system from the central heating thermostats. Most standard heating systems will have a single thermostat, but more complex systems with more than one zone will have multiple thermostats.
Your specialist heating installer will show you how the system works, and should provide you with an operation manual. This will explain how to turn the whole system on or off.
You’ll also need to know which systems in your house are incorporated into the heating system. For instance, your hot water or your swimming pool may be heated by your gas boiler, so it’s important to know how they all work so you don’t switch them off by mistake.
If there’s a fault or a problem with your hydronic heating system, and you think you need to turn the system off, generally it’s safe to turn off the boiler or heat pump. There should be a master isolating switch near the boiler which will turn off power to the heating system.
You’ll generally want to turn your heating system on around Easter weekend if you’re living in Australia. If your heating system is more than a couple of years old, then it’s a good idea to have it serviced before you switch it back on. You can contact a heating specialist near you who will conduct a thorough check of the heating system and make sure everything’s operating correctly. That’s the best way to ensure that the system doesn’t break down over winter.
There’s a few things that need to be checked. If you have a radiator system air can build up in the radiators. This forms a bubble in the top of the radiator panel, which stops it from filling with warm water and means that your radiator won’t heat up properly.
We can resolve that by ‘bleeding’ the radiator. There’s a valve on top that we can open up to let the air out.
Your heating specialist can also check the concentration of corrosion inhibitor in the system. The inhibitor is a chemical solution that prevents the metal components in the system from degrading over time. Generally the system is dosed at around 0.5% inhibitor.
If you have a hydronic heating system and would like it services by the experts, contact us today.