getconnected.honeywell.com | I work for Honeywell. Any posts I make are purely to help if I can. Any personal views expressed are my own
No use. There isn't a far end of the pipe run as such as its not laid out in a ladder configuration with short runs to each radiator.
For the downstairs there is a main 22mm trunk feed about 4m long from the boiler to a central underfloor location near the hallway, from here it branches off in every direction to each individual radiator in a kind of a star configuration with all pipes except the living room being 8mm microbore. So no matter which individual radiator comes on only the 22mm trunk and the pipes to that one radiator will get hot, all the runs to the other radiators will stay cold, and some of them are as much as 5 metres.
Annoyingly I also discovered when I was down there that when the guys converted the living room from single end feed 8mm to more modern 15mm both end feed (using PVC) they didn't remove the old pipes - they just squeezed and soldered the end of the old 8mm microbore and literally left it hanging there in mid air. So I have a 2x5 metre dead end run of microbore that is still tapped back into the main trunk that never flows and is therefore more vulnerable to freezing than the ones that are operational.
If I'd known that was there when I did the drain down recently I would have got under there and snipped that off right back near the trunk and soldered a couple of caps over the stubs... but because it's still there and connected (and thus able to burst and leak) I decided I'd have to insulate the dead end runs just like all the other pipes! Grr... next drain down they will be getting surgically removed.
Last edited by DBMandrake; 29th November 2016 at 01:07 PM.
This was my solution to the exact same problem. We had underfloor insulation fitted last summer and I was concerned that we would return to frozen central heating pipes under the house when we returned from being away for a week. I asked the guys who were doing the insulation to do it and it was only about £25 if I remember correctly. Much better than crawling round there doing it my self. Unfortunately they convinced me that the fabric insulation that was wrapped around half the pipework was sufficient. At some point I'll probably end up doing that myself.
Incidentally, I've set the 'Away' quick action to 10 degrees for all zones and use that instead. The gas usage doesn't seem to be that huge and it means there is less chance of freezing and the house takes less time to come back up to temperature.