{"id":1285,"date":"2022-10-02T00:35:18","date_gmt":"2022-10-02T00:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/?p=1285"},"modified":"2024-03-19T10:14:32","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T10:14:32","slug":"potterton-profile-tripping-out-occasionally-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/central-heating\/potterton-profile-tripping-out-occasionally-why\/","title":{"rendered":"Potterton Profile tripping out occasionally – why?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Potterton Profile tripping out occasionally – why?<\/h2>\n
\"Potterton
Potterton Profile boiler. The overheat reset button is out of view on the underside, inside a finger-sized hole.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A number Potterton Profile owners suffer from this irritating problem. The boiler works perfectly for days or weeks then out of the blue it stops dead and sits silently, refusing to respond. The fix is to press the reset button back in, located on the underside of the boiler. Phew! <\/p>\n

But the trouble is although this gets the heat back on, it doesn’t fix the reason for the button occasionally popping out in the first place and you just KNOW it will do it again. The real cause is the boiler overheated. The button underneath is an overheat protection thermostat and it pops out when the heat exchanger in the boiler gets dangerously close to boiling. Paradoxically the last thing you want your boiler to do is to actually boil, so the overheat thermostat monitors it 24\/7\/365 and pops out if it gets too hot.<\/p>\n

So the real question that needs answering is why does your Profile get too hot and pop its thermostat once in a while? There are two possibilities. Firstly, the main control thermostat might be failing. This is the temperature control knob on the front of the boiler, bottom right, calibrated 1 to 5. This actually sets the temperature of the water coming from the boiler for circulating around the radiators. It tends to fail by losing its calibration, in such a way as to make the boiler deliver ever hotter water for a given setting. Most people set it on 3 or 4 and if their overheat button starts popping out occasionally, discover they can stop it happening by turning the control down to 2, or perhaps 1. Eventually this stops working and the overheat button still pops out with the temp control set to minimum, and this indicates a new primary control thermostat is needed. I buy them in batches of 10 or 20 so that gives you an idea of how common a fault this is. <\/p>\n

A second, more subtle cause can be the pump over-run thermostat. When the boiler is turned off by the room thermostat or programmer, if the gas burner happens to be running then there will be an amount of residual heat in the metal of the cast iron heat exchanger which continues to heat the water for a minute or two after the gas burner shuts off. To prevent the water in the heat exchanger stopping flowing and actually boiling due to this effect, the circulating pump needs to continue to run for a few minutes after the boiler turns OFF. To achieve this, the pump is powered by a “pump over-run thermostat’ inside the Profile boiler. This keeps the pump running until the heat exchanger cools to a set temperature. I don’t know what it is exactly but probably 80c. As you can probably imagine, for the boiler to run the pump there needs to be a mains power supply into the boiler, even when it is set to OFF. This is called the “permanent mains supply”. <\/p>\n

Now a problem arises if a plumber, electrician or whoever doesn’t understand this and decides to leave out (or worse, disconnect) the permanent mains supply. It really isn’t obvious why it is present in the first place just by looking at the boiler, so this happens from time to time. The net result is when the boiler is turned OFF by the room thermostat or programmer while the main burner happens to be running, AND the boiler is approaching set temperature too, the pump over-run will not operate and the boiler will momentarily boil, tripping the overheat thermostat. If the extra permanent live cable connection is missing from the boiler terminal connection block, then this is quite likely to be the cause of the overheat button popping out occasionally. Or more subtly, I’ve seen the permanent live wiring present and connected but not actually still live when the boiler is OFF. This too will cause the overheat button to pop out. The fix is, naturally, to install the permanent live supply permanently as the manufacturer intended…<\/p>\n

I’ve written more about the Potterton Netaheat Profile on my Netaheat Repairs website, here:
\nhttps:\/\/netaheat-repairs.co.uk\/potterton-netaheat-profile-boiler.html<\/a><\/p>\n

If you’d like your Profile fixed, text or call me on 07866 766364<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Potterton Profile tripping out occasionally – why? A number Potterton Profile owners suffer from this irritating problem. The boiler works perfectly for days or weeks then out of the blue it stops dead and sits silently, refusing to respond. The fix is to press the reset button back in, located on the underside of the boiler. Phew!  But the trouble is although this gets the heat back on, it doesn’t fix the reason for the button occasionally popping out in the first place and you just KNOW it will do it again. The real cause is the boiler overheated. The\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,3,47],"tags":[],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":5}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1377,"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions\/1377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketheboilerman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}