Things to check if your Johnson & Starley breaks down…

 

…and before calling someone out.

 

If your warm air heating system has broken down, here are some basic checks you can make before calling someone out. Might just save you a call-out charge!

 

1) If yours is an old one, check the pilot light is alight on the warm air on the left, and also the second pilot flame on the Janus hot water heater on the right. To re-light the pilots there are usually instructions written on the inside of the front panel.

 

If you have one of the Economaire range of boilers, these light themselves automatically and have no permanent pilot flame. Instead they have a small LED display showing a single digit or letter. through a viewing hole in the front panel. This is a status code. A zero means the boiler thinks it is working correctly and the fault lies elsewhere. If yours isn’t a zero, you’ll know there really is a fault and you need to call someone out. Tell them what the display is showing when you call, or you can look it up in the chart on Page 19 of the boiler manual for more detail.

 

If you have one named “Warmcair”, it will have a “Reset” button on the LCD user control panel. If the LCD panel is displaying the word “LOCKOUT”, press the reset button.

 

 

2) The room thermostat - make sure it is turned UP! Also check the electrical power switch on the wall has not been turned off accidentally, and the time switch/programmer is set to an ON period.

 

 

3) The filter. If your boiler seems to run but you just don’t get much (or any) warm air from the warm air vents, the filter may be blocked. All warm air boilers have a filter of some sort in them. A pull-out panel of gauze is the simplest and most common, usually in the top. Here is a set of three filters just removed from a Brink warm air boiler and before cleaning them. The left hand filter panel is mostly blocked but I’ve seen much worse! The manual says clean the filter fortnightly so if you don’t know your’s is there, chances are it’s never been cleaned. Find it and pull it out, and if it looks like a piece of carpet this will be the problem! Clean off the ‘lint’ and warm air flow will probably be restored.

 

 

I’m Mike Bryant, also known as Mike the Boilerman. If none of the above works and you are within driving distance of me in west Berkshire, call or text me on my mobile for more information or to arrange a visit, 07866 766364. 

 

Areas I cover are best described as the M4 corridor from Bristol to Windsor, the home counties and the south coast. Places further afield are always a possibility, try me! 

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