Boiler Blues: Our Alde Springs a Leak

Boiler Blues: Our Alde Springs a Leak

Big Bertha is a complicated beast; our hot water and radiator heating comes from our Alde boiler. We can heat that water using gas, electricity (when we are plugged into a shore supply) or using the engine heat (when driving). You can imagine the plumbing involved! And you can also imagine our dismay when we discovered a puddle underneath it between Christmas and New Year’s Day. What to do? Buy a new one and bring it back with us from Europe (it’s not available in Africa) or take a chance and try and fix it? Both options came with difficulties and risks.

We decided to risk a strip down, try to identify the leak and repair. First we had to visit the DIY shops to buy some metal tubing and bolts to make hose clamps to isolate the boiler from the glycol heating circuit. Having disconnected the flue, 240VAC electrics, 12V electrics, gas supply, cold water in, hot water out and clamped off the glycol circuit, David extracted the boiler ready for disassembly.

This was a fairly straight forward exercise of removing the cover (not easy) removing the fan, gas solenoid, control board, sensors and gas burner – leaving the stainless steel tank. This being an outer cylinder (fresh water) wrapped around an inner cylinder (glycol).

Dave then pressurised the fresh water tank (the leak was clear, not glycol pink) with a spare water pump and identified a pin hole leak on the seam weld. This would need a repair using an inert gas welding machine and an experienced stainless steel welder. On New Year’s Eve.

The South African’s are a friendly lot and Omar opened up his workshop to help us out. An after repair pressure test was good and Dave reassembled and installed the boiler on New Year’s Day. Dave was very happy to have started the year with complex, but successful, repair and Francine was happy to have hot water again.

UPDATE February 2023

Another leak! This time a pin hole leak developed between the glycol and fresh water tanks, leading to fresh water bleeding into the glycol and forcing the diluted glycol mix out through the header tank. Unfortunately, the overflow pipe had become blocked with sand and dirt etc., and the glycol was forced out of the header tank breather into the truck. This led to some of our precious diaries becoming waterlogged.

Anyway, out came the boiler (again) and we had it tig welded at a local workshop. Luckily, no problems since…..