Boiler repair

The Heizomat boiler has been pretty reliable over the 12 years it has been installed.   The manufacturer claims a working life of 35 - 40 years.   But it started playing up.  It burns wood, there is a series of electric motors that feed the wood into the boiler, and two fans that blow air to aid the combustion.  Whenever wood is being fed into the boiler, the fans blow all that time.   Their speed is set by a computer.

The problem was that the fans were only blowing intermittently instead of continuously, and were blowing less and less over a period of some days.  Eventually the boiler went out.  When I restarted it, the fans blew for a higher proportion of the time, but not for all the time that they should.

The diagnosis was most likely a problem with the controlling computer card, or a tiny possibility that it was the control panel screen.   Rather than pay for a replacement of both I opted for just the new controller card, and since we're in lockdown I agreed with the after-sales guys that I would fit it myself.

Here is a picture of the old card in place, with its protective perspex cover and some of the plugs removed.  I replaced it with the new card, and restarted the boiler.  No sparks, no bangs, which is a good start.  The boiler seemed to work well, and I shut it off after a week or so because the weather was warm.  But since the problem was intermittent, I won't really know until I run the boiler for at least a couple of months, which will be in the Autumn.

I suppose that if the boiler is going to fail, doing so when there are no customers is a good time to do it.   I wouldn't have liked to have to deal with this problem, and customers at the same time.   To follow:  The Phone Line Saga, currently a work in progress.