Boiler cuts out

Im going to be brutally honest Paul. A 30 year old boiler is not worth spending a single penny on.
Do you drive a 30 year old car?
If the answer is no then why the hell have you let your boiler reach that sort of age?
The average age of a boiler is 15 years, what you have is a miracle and its probably costing you a fortune to run, let alone a primitive system.
From the symptoms you describe I would sugest its the gas valve at fault but I doubt if you will find one especially if its the old red and white button one.

 

Don't do gas, but Thorn EMI long gone, Dave is the expert who can answer that question as what to replace it with.

 

Plenty of reasonable quality boilers out there to replace it with, but I doubt that any will go anywhere near 30 years.
Thorn boilers no longer available.

As to what to replace it with:

Vaillant / Glowworm much the same boiler these days, get an installer registered with them and you can access a 10 year warranty.

Ideal Logics, a nice little boiler but in my experience prone to reliability problems. They had a big problem with split h/x (would never admit it) which seems to have passed now, but I've had a few now with the plastic sump splitting and leaking all been fixed under warranty but that is not really the point. 7 year warranties.

Veissmann look really good. 5 year warranties.

Whatever installer you use will have his favourite so go with that. But I'd fit a Glowworm these days, same h/x as the Vaillant, long warranty, £200 cheaper.

 

Hi,
The Glow-worm have changed their heat exchanger to... wait for it... aluminium!
You know, the stuff that sort of rust, crumble away, and when you try to get a bolt out, it snaps off?

We are approved Glow-worm and vailliant installers, but I have told our Rep, we won't be installing them

Regards
Peter

 

You will almost certainly have to have your system upgraded to fully pumped as part of the process, I would probably recomend that you replace your cylinder to a modern high recovery one as I can only assume your cylinder is of a similar age as the boiler.
Just by this process you will start to save money as you will have greater cointrol over your heating and hot water.
You may also want to consider replacing your old style radiators with modern compacts. These again are more efficent than the old style lumps we used to hang particularly if you add thermostatic controls.

 

You're right of course and we are a bit concerned about the aluminium change on Vaillant and Glowworm as well.
But almost all the manufacturers use Al now so what will you be fitting. I think that Veissmann are the only ones doing a heat only Stainless h/x.
Apparently the Aluminium is a high spec silicon Al (??) and we'll have to watch the pH level of the circulating water.

 

And the same to you Paul.

We can learn a lot from East Europeans in that in times of economical difficulties that there is no need to throw away things that can easily be repaired just because they are not to current standards.

Old fashioned gas boilers will just keep on going on and on and on and to be honest I've personally found that the savings in fuel are greatly exaggerated by the makers of HE boilers.