Why Has My Boiler Stopped Working? It’s Freezing Outside.

My Boiler Stopped Working

My Heating Has Frozen.

 

This time of the year the weather can be particularly cold with freezing temperatures mainly overnight,

but believe it or not it can have an affect your boiler. Boilers don’t like the cold.

You may wake up in the morning only to find the house is cold due to the boiler stopped working.

 

Strange you may think, when you need the heat most, the boiler decides to stop working.

The most common cause of the boiler stopped working is a frozen condense pipe.

 

Most boilers are now high efficiency condensing boilers, and as such produce condense, with freezing temperatures the condense can freeze.

This condense pipe needs to disperse into a drain

 If it exits into an outside drain the chances are it has become blocked due to ice.

 

This will make your boiler stop working as the condense cannot disperse from the boiler.

You may see a flashing fault code appear on your boiler display screen or even some flashing lights.

If this is the case first try to reset the boiler,

if that does not work, you need to trace the condense pipe to check to see if it is frozen.

To trace the condense pipe first go to the boiler and look for a plastic pipe,

depending on the make of boiler it could be either to the left or right side of the boiler

if you are not sure look in the boiler book, if you cannot find it, search online.

Now you have located the condense pipe you need to warm it up to clear the ice blockage.

Heat some water up, not boiling but hot, pour over any exposed pipe, you may need to do this a couple of times.

You should start to see water coming out of the pipe, once it stops go back to the boiler and reset it again, you should now have a working boiler.

If your condense pipe has no protection around it,

 

pop along to a local hardware store and buy some insulation and wrap the pipe up as much as you can, this will help protect it from the cold.

If during the winter months you continue to suffer from this problem and the boiler stopped working it may be worth calling in a gas safe registered engineer to rectify this problem.

If your boiler stopped working in the cold weather, then the first thing you should do

before calling anyone in is checking the condense, it’s a quick fix and could save you a call out charge.