Magnaclean problems

I like Adey, they always seem keen to help and their products are invariably great. Sadly though, things seem to be on the wane.

When you install a new boiler the manufacturers like to see the CH system thoroughly cleaned out, a task that can often take as long as the boiler installation itself. So to streamline the process we recently bought a Adey Magnacleanse, which is a much quicker way of cleaning the gunk out of an old CH system.

The Magnacleanse has been working brilliantly and we have absolutely no problems with it at all. However, the easiest way of using the Magnacleanse is to first fit a Magnaclean unit to the CH system, and sadly the Magnaclean has been letting us down left, right and centre.

The first one we fitted couldn’t be isolated! No matter what we did with the isolation valves we couldn’t get them both to close. This is an essential requirement if you want to use the Magnacleanse or add inhibitor to the system. We were rather keen to do both and so were doubly frustrated. So that unit went back and was replaced.

A few weeks later and we pressurise the CH only to discover a fine spray of water gushing from the Maganaclean. This time the problem was caused by a split in one of the copper fittings that comes with the unit and so we had to drain the system, remove the fitting and replace it.

This week’s problem was minor in comparison but seems to speak volumes about the direction in which the Magnaclean is heading – I opened the little plastic bag in which the valves arrive only to discover that washers had only been supplied for one of the valves. So I had to drive back to the merchants and get them to open up a new Magnaclean so I could nick a washer.

Of course we could be just having a spate of very poor luck but I think not. I suspect that in an endeavour to keep the price of the Magnaclean down in the face of growing competition corners have been cut. 

Adey don’t strike me as the sort of company that would let this continue for any length of time so, hopefully we’ll see some improvements over the coming months – I certainly hope so.