Why is my wood-burning boiler stove not heating all the radiators?

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A boiler stove is a great way of cutting your reliance on central heating (and therefore your heating bills) by using your stove to also heat your radiators and provide hot water.

But it is not always the easiest thing to get right. So, what’s going wrong if your boiler stove installation isn’t heating all of your radiators? Here are some possibilities to investigate….

The temperature is too low on the boiler thermostat

This is the best case scenario. It could be that you just need to turn the thermostat up to achieve the desired temperature.

The air intake flap isn’t opening properly

When you turned up the thermostat, did the air intake flap open properly? If not, it could be a fault with this that is causing the problem.

Your stove isn’t big enough

One possibility is that the boiler stove you’ve installed simply isn’t big enough for the requirements of the system. These requirements will vary considerably depending on the size, shape, surface area and performance of your radiators, what material they are made from and whether they are double or single.

On that basis it is hard to get a precise calculation of how many radiators a particular appliance will heat, but a very rough guide would be to allocate at least 1.5kW of heat output per average-sized, regular radiator.

Remember, that is only an approximation and refers to the heat output going to the boiler – you also need to allow for heat going to the room itself.

Try turning off half the radiators to see if the temperature increases in the other half. If it does, turn them back on one at a time to see how many you can use before it impacts on the performance again.

A problem with the circulating pump

Is it your downstairs radiators that are failing to heat? If so, this often points to a problem with the circulating pump in the heating system. Your upstairs radiators are able to heat using gravity, but downstairs radiators need a circulating pump.

If the radiators are getting hot at the top but no the bottom, this also indicates circulation problems.

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