How to fix your central heating – Troubleshooting checklist
There could be a number of reasons why your central heating or hot water isn’t working.
You can fix several problems yourself, avoiding a callout and – Try these tips first:
- Check the gas, electrical and water supplies to the appliance are turned on. It’s surprising how easily they can get accidentally switched off.
- Check the thermostat is turned up and the clock timer is on.
- Some boilers have a pressure gauge showing system water pressure, this usually needs to be at around 1 bar
- Got a system with a permanent pilot light? Check that it hasn’t gone out – this is a very common problem with older appliances.
- Try putting your heating on maximum for a short while to see if you can get it back into action.
- Have the clocks gone forward or back? Your clock programmer might just need adjusting to the right time.
- Has there been a power cut recently? Your heating clock programmer may have returned to its factory settings when the power came back on. Test the central heating by setting it to come on in 15 minutes time – if that works, simply re-enter your preferred settings.
- Do you have a customer-operated reset switch (not one that needs you to remove any casing)? These are usually found on the front of modern boilers: check your user manual to see if it needs re-setting.
- Try turning the electrical supply to the boiler off and on – the switch is usually near the boiler or in the airing cupboard. This might reset your boiler and resolve the problem.
- Could you have frozen pipes? In periods of long, cold weather, the condensate pipe of your boiler can freeze.
- Are other gas appliances affected? If so the problem is bigger and you need to book an engineer.