no heat

dpframing

My tenant called and says he just walked into his apartment and the temp was 61.  As I'm headed over, a half-hour later, he calls and says he reset the thermostat and now he feels the heat coming up. What could that have been? If it's a circulator pump gong or  something else like a relay, they wouldn't work sporadically until they went for good, would they?  Any feedback is graetly appreciated since I don't know anything about heating. Thanks. 

nicholas bonham-carter

Thermostat reset

How did he reset the thermostat ?

What sort of system is this?

If you don't know anything about heating, how will our guesses about a far away undescribed system help you.

Has this system been regularly serviced?--NBC

dpframing

reply

10 year old Weil McClane boiler that never had problems at all . Slant Fin base boards - gas hot water heat. The tenant saya the thermostat was set to heat and he didn't change the temp setting of 72. I think he saw the room temp readout was 61 and then he reset the digital temp to higher than 72. That turned the system on. It's a mystery to me. The thermostat is digital which requires 2 AA batteries which I replaced 2 months ago. Tomorrow I will put in 2 Ultra Duracell to rule out battery problem, but beyond that, I don't know what to do.   

dpframing

reply

The system never needed any service before this. So no one has checked it out in its 10 year life. The system doesn't need bleeding since there is a Spirovent installed , and the unit always had good heat at all the baseboards.  

Jean-David Beyer

The system never needed any service before this.

"So no one has checked it out in its 10 year life."



Let me tell you a (true) story that you may think of as a parable.



I had a boss who did not have patience with automotive maintenance. His view was that once you bought one, it should just go forever. He even resented putting gasoline in one, though he managed to do that. He bought a brand new Pontiac station wagon (this was in the early 1960s). It went about 25,000 miles until the engine seized up. Since he never checked or added oil in that time, I was pretty impressed that it went that far. This guy was a very competent electronic engineer, but it did not seem to carry over to other things.

dpframing

Yes you're right

I knew I was lax in taking care of the system. Unfortunately, something's wrong in the middle of the season. I think I will wait and see if the tenant has an additional problem, and if I luck out and  get throught the season ok, I will definitely have everything checked out before I turn on the heat next year and maybe every year after that. I just don 't know why the boiler would respond to the thermostat being turned up, unles the theromstat is going bad and not turning on the boiler only sometimes.    

kayakingphotos

thermostat

My brother had a no heat issue with one zone in his system (LP boiler/baeboards)



He changed the batteries in the thermostat and it would not work. When I got there I noticed the display was "messed up", just random segments on the display lit up. I took it off the wall and cleaned the contacts since they were a bit corroded. Still not right. Then I noticed a little black button on the back and wondered "what does this button do???" It turns out it was  a hard reset button and it fixed everything. Display back to normal and the heat worked. Just had to reset the time and programming on it



Patrick

dpframing

Thanks for the post.

Thanks for that one.