pipes Archives -

Air locks are a common enough problem in relation to water piping (they also occur in radiators). Often when you attempt to turn on a tap and no water comes out it is due to there being an air lock located somewhere within your piping. As the name implies, an air lock is essentially a pocket of air which has become trapped in your piping and obstructs the flow of water.

Fortunately, in the majority of cases, the problem can be fixed without the need for bringing in a professional plumber. All you need to fix the majority of water pipe air locks is an ordinary hose and some free time to carry out the works.

How to Fix Air Locks:

If the tap which is affected by an air lock is located indoors you should place towels, newspapers or some form of absorbent cloth down in the general area where you will be working before you start as spillages are likely.

Draining your Plumbing System:

If your efforts to remove an air lock from your pipes by means of the hose method have proven to be unsuccessful, you may need to have your plumbing system drained in full. While this does sound like a difficult and messy task, it is nowhere near as complicated as it sounds.
You should be able to do it yourself if you follow these steps:

If done correctly, this method should completely remove all air locks from your water pipes.

If you are having trouble carrying out either of the remedies outlined in this article or you have followed these instructions closely and are still experiencing problems, you should contact DeWAR Plumbers (on our phone number 01 514 3300 or send us an email) for assistance and/or advice.

Saving Water at Home

Saving Water at Home – One of the hot topics in Ireland these days is that of the upcoming metered water charges being introduced to our nation. A great many people are, somewhat understandably, annoyed at the introduction of what feels like an additional unfair and unnecessary bill on top of what is already a rapidly increasing cost of living, with people having less net income than before. The situation has led some people to staunchly oppose the installation of water meters in their area by means of public protest. Such demonstrations occurred nationwide including in counties Cork and Dublin.

Tips on Saving Water at Home

While, at the best of times, most people did make a conscious effort to Saving Water for environmental reasons, the prospect of losing out on much-needed money is making more homes and business more aware than ever in relation to how much water they are using. With that in mind, here are some top tips on how to limit the amount of water you use up in the day to day running of your home:

Toilets:

The toilet is the most water guzzling device found in any household. On average, people flush their toilets no less than five times every single day (simply not flushing your toilet in order to save water and money is not recommended for health and sanitation reasons). At first thought, it may seem impossible to reduce how much water is used up with every single flush, but there are in fact ways to do this.

Around the mid-1990s, toilet design and mechanics changed significantly for the better, with the new generation of toilets using significantly less water per flush than their predecessors while being capable of flushing away the same amount of unwanted waste. If you have a particularly old toilet, upgrading it to a more efficient model is one way of limiting how much water is literally flushed away. ‘Dual flush’ toilets are particularly useful in that they can limit how much water you use depending on the manner and amount of waste that needs flushing. This prevents you from having to use up more water than is necessary when flushing away small amounts of waste. Of course, buying a new toilet is a fairly expensive and lengthy undertaking which is not necessarily a viable option for everyone.

If this option is not available to you, there are ways of limiting how much water your older, less efficient toilet uses up when it flushes. Placing a solid object in an old toilet’s cistern will limit how much water is used in every flush. If you use the right sized object you will be able to save a large amount of water while not reducing your toilet’s ability to dispose of waste adequately. An old favorite used to be placing a brick in the toilet’s cistern. While your standard brick is pretty much the exact size and density required to get the aforementioned cistern water balance right, it is not a very good long term solution to your toilet’s water wastage problem. Most bricks are soluble in water. This means that they break down over time when exposed to water. This, in turn, can lead to bits of clay clogging up your drainage system’s piping which can lead to awkward plumbing works having to be carried out at a later date. An alternative and more durable object of similar size should be used instead.

One last water saving tip as far as toilets are concerned is to not use your toilet as a bin. People often use their toilet as a means of disposing of tissues and other light waste (or, in some cases, not so light waste). The bin was made for such things and doesn’t require lots of water to be used up in order for it to work, so use your bin as a bin instead!

Taps:

Another, less obvious, form of water wastage in a typical household is that of dripping and leaking taps. While one drop of water won’t make much difference to your water bills, if you have enough of them they can really add up! The average dripping tap is believed to waste in the region of 90 litres of water every week. When you add that up, it amounts to upward of 4,500 litres of water wasted every year due to something as simple and easily rectified as leaking taps.

To prevent this surprisingly excessive loss of water all you have to do is ensure that your taps are firmly closed after each use. It really is that simple. In some cases, taps may continue to drip after being fully closed. In such cases, it means there is a problem with the taps and a professional plumber should be called in to rectify the situation. Do not use excessive force to close the tap as this will only cause further damage, resulting in trickier (and more expensive) repairs being needed.

Another way to limit how much water your taps use up is to only leave them running only when the water is actually needed. Do you really need to leave a high-pressure stream of water running for the entire duration of your morning wash up routine (eg: brushing teeth, washing face etc.)? In many cases, a small dribble of water to get started and another one to finish up is generally all you need. While such water saving measures may, at first, seem petty and insignificant, they do add up over time. Once you get into the habit of not leaving the tap running in such situations you’ll soon wonder why you ever bothered doing it in the first place at all.

If your taps exert a very high pressure of water, you might want to consider having low-flow tap aerators installed. These handy devices reduce water pressure in your taps, meaning less water is used up by your taps per second. This will not inhibit your ability to wash yourself (most taps send out more water per second than people can use anyway), but will save both water and money.

Pipes:

Taps are not the only thing which waste lots of water over time via drips. Pipes are also susceptible to minor leaks and drips which waste a surprisingly high volume of water. Unfortunately, dripping pipes are not as easy to spot as dripping taps so you will need to be a bit more proactive in terms of leak detection as far as they are concerned. You should regularly check all radiator, bathroom and kitchen related piping for leaks, drips and punctures. This will allow you to identify any problematic pipes and have the issues nipped in the bud by a professional plumber before they become major problems and require more complex (and expensive) maintenance work.

You should run water through any piping which has gone for an extended period of time without use (such as radiator pipes which have gone unused during the warm summer months or pipes connected to a toilet in a spare guest room which does not get much use) in order to make sure that they aren’t leaking. This will stop them from springing a nasty surprise upon you when you decide to call them back into action all of a sudden.

Washing Machines

While washing machines are known for using up an excessive amount of electricity in order to operate, they also use up very high volumes of water. In order to save water, you should only use washing machines when you have a full load to do. Even then, you will probably not need to put the machine on at its highest settings or longest cycle. Not only will this approach to washing machines save you money on water and electricity charges, but it also decreases the chances of your clothes shrinking or having their colours run into each other during the washing cycle.

Kitchen

The day to day running of a functioning kitchen requires the use of quite a lot of water. This is an unavoidable fact, but does not mean that you should throw in the towel. There are still ways to limit how much water you use in the kitchen and make saving water.

For example, when you are cooking you will often find yourself with leftover water (often referred to as ‘gray water’). Rather than simply pouring this down the sink, you can get good use out of ‘recycling’ it as it contains nutrients which have been transferred into the water during the cooking process. One clever use of the gray water is for watering plants. The nutrients contained within gray water that was made when cooking vegetables (for vitamins) and boiling eggs (for calcium) is significantly better for your plants than the normal water provided by your taps.

Garden:

The aforementioned gray water helps you reduce the amount of water that you need to keep your garden’s plants fresh and healthy. If you don’t have any gray water to use you should always try to avoid watering your garden plants with a hose as this unnecessarily uses up far more water than is needed, much of with simply goes to waste by means of evaporation (if it is sprayed on too thickly) or just missing its target completely.

Perfectly god water falls from the sky in some volume nearly every day in Ireland. If you are savvy you can collect this water and use it as you see fit. Setting up containers such as barrels or storage drums will allow you to gather large quantities of rain water which you can hang on to for times when rain is scarce and your garden’s plants are running the risk of drying out. This simple means of irrigation can save you a great deal on your water bills over the course of the year.

Showers or Baths?

One of the most hotly debated aspects of saving water is which means of washing one’s self is less wasteful; baths or showers. Most people will tell you that having a shower uses up less water than taking a bath, but is this necessarily true in all cases? There are a number of factors which must be taken into consideration before declaring one as being better outright.

The main thing to consider about showers is that not all showers are the same. They vary wildly in terms of output. A state of the art power shower, for example, will expel water at a rate of 17 litres every minute. A bathtub, when full, generally hold around 200 litres of water. With this in mind, using a power shower for ten minutes or less will result in you using up considerably less water than if you were to take a bath. Considering the average person spends roughly eight minutes in the shower at a time, it appears that we have a clear winner – taking a shower will save you more water than if you were to take a bath instead.

Just because the average shower uses up less water than the average bath doesn’t mean that the case is closed. There are more things to take into consideration in relation to a shower. For example, showers use up electricity in addition to the water that they expel. This increases two household bills instead of just one. The combined price of running an electric shower for a full year in the average UK household has been worked out as costing in the region of €900 (around €1,100) per annum.

To reduce the amount of water that your power shower expels you should consider having what is called a ‘low-flow’ shower head installed onto it. This simple device will cut the volume of water sprayed out by an electric shower in half, offering a substantial saving in terms of water charges. Having a ‘low-flow’ shower head will not reduce your power shower’s ability to clean you as such showers have too much water pressure in any case.

In the case of nonpower showers, they can sometimes take a few minutes to heat up, meaning that you will have to leave them running for a while before you can hop in and wash yourself. Instead of simply letting said water run down the drain and go to waste, you should attempt to collect it and use it for other means (similar to the way we use ‘gray water’ as outlined in the ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Garden’ sections above). Collecting said water should be as easy as placing a bucket or basin in your shower area before you get started.

Condensate Drainage Pipe Maintenance

Condensate Drainage Pipe – One of the more serious problems associated with central heating systems is that of blockages accumulating in a gas boiler or oil boiler’s condensate drainage pipes. Such blockages reduce your boiler’s efficiency levels and, in extreme cases, have been known to lead to the boiler breaking down completely. While such problems are a lot more common during the cold winter months, problems can occur all year ’round so looking after your central heating system’s condensate drainage pipes should not be limited to winter time. Listed below is advice on how best to take care of your condensate drainage pipes in terms of fixing problems and preventing them from happening again in the future:

Condensate: A Definition

When we refer to condensate in the context of central heating systems and their boilers we are talking about the moisture which is emitted from the boiler’s flue and gathered in a specially devised collection area (usually a discharge pipe or, in some cases, a ‘condensate trap’) after it has passed through your boiler. These collection points are designed to limit the chances of your central heating system’s pipes from clogging up as well as becoming frozen pipe during winter

Condensate Drainage Pipe Maintenance Tips:

It is extremely important that you keep your gas/oil boiler’s condensate drainage pipe in proper working order for both fuel efficiency and health and safety reasons. Depending on the amount of time and/or resources you have available to you, there are both short term and long term ways of looking after your condensate drainage pipe.

Long Term Solutions:

The best and most permanent boiler condensate drainage pipe maintenance solution is relocating said boiler and its related piping to as warm an area as possible. Keeping your drainage pipes from areas that or prone to freezing or just cold in general (such as basements, attics etc.) is always a good idea. This will ensure that the condensate found within your drainage pipe does not become frozen when the temperature drops during cold winter months.
Such work should ideally take place long before the temperature lowers late in the year in order to avoid cold wintertime drafts and interference from bad weather while the relocating is being carried out.

If relocating your oil boiler or gas boiler and all of its associated piping is not feasible due to financial or logistical reasons you can also install layers of high quality insulating materials around your boiler’s condensate drainage piping. This should prevent freezing in all but the most lengthy and extreme of cold weather conditions.

Short Term Solutions:

If you are unable to carry out long term fixes for your boiler’s condensate drainage pipe problems there are still some options available to you. While they will not be quite as effective or, indeed, as long term as those solutions mentioned above, they can provide a helpful fix for a while at least. Here are two of the better short term ideas:

If your condensate drainage pipe is causing you problems and you don’t know what to do then you should contact DeWAR Plumbers. Our 24 hour phone line 01 514 3300 is free to call. We can also be contacted via email.

Power Flushing your Heating System FAQ

Over time, all manner of dirt, grime and other kinds of unwanted blockages can accumulate within the piping of your home’s heating system. A Power Flushing Service is a very efficient way of cleaning such undesirable elements out your central heating system. Using a specially designed Power Flush device, an experienced DeWAR Plumber pumps a combination of water and cleansing chemicals which pass through your heating system’s pipe work, loosening and removing the aforementioned unwanted debris, leaving your system free to operate at its full capacity.

What Signs Show that a Heating System Needs a Power Flushing Service?

If you have noticed any of these signs then there is good reason to suspect that your home’s central heating system could make use a Power Flush Service. Arranging to have a professional plumber come out and perform a Power Flush Service is advisable as it will help prevent larger problems from arising in the future.

How Long does a Power Flush Service take?

The exact length of time needed to perform a Power Flush Service depends on certain factors such as the number of radiators that you have in your property as well as how badly blocked your central heating system’s piping actually is. A typical Power Flush Service in your standard home with little or no complications generally only takes between four and five hours from start to finish. However, when allocating a time frame for your Power Flush Service you should ideally put aside a whole day. This covers you in case anything unforeseen happens and the job turns out to be more complicated than initially anticipated.

Is a Power Flush Service a Messy Operation?

At DeWAR Plumbers we understand that keeping your home tidy while carrying out our services is of the utmost importance. To that end, we make it our business to carry out our Power Flush Services as efficiently and with as little collateral mess as possible. We take all the necessary precautions to ensure that all radiators and piping are drained out thoroughly, with all waste matter collected appropriately so no mess is created via expelled water and dirt.

What are the Main Advantages of a Power Flush Service?

There are a great many good reasons to have your central heating system power flushed. These are the main ones:

How Often Should a Home Central Heating System be Power Flushed?

While there is no absolute time frame on when a Power Flushing Service should be carried out as every central heating system is different, the general consensus is that a home heating system should be Power Flushed every four to five years to ensure that its radiators run at their optimum levels of efficiency. In some cases, a Power Flushing Service may be required more often – see the signs listed earlier in this article for a better indication.

Is a Power Flush Service Needed for New Radiators and Boilers?

Generally speaking, yes. Usually when having new radiators and / or boilers installed the appliances themselves tend to be in impeccable working order. However, the same cannot always be said for the pipes which are being attached to them. If said pipes are old or have been running a lot prior to the installation of the new appliances, they could well have accumulated all manner of limescale, grime and other undesirable elements. If that is the case, then connecting them to your brand new appliances can only lead to them suffering from blockages long before their time.

It is strongly recommended that a Power Flush service be carried out on your home’s central heating system’ pipes before you install any new radiators or boilers. A Power Flushing Service is much simpler when radiators and boilers are not involved, so it will save you time and hassle by doing carrying one out before you install said appliances. It also allows the new appliances to work at their highest levels of efficiency straight away and for a very long time to come.

If you feel that your home’s central heating system would benefit from having a power flush service carried out you should give DeWAR Plumbers a call and organise one. Our number, 01 514 3300, is free to call and we can be contacted via email as well.