Anyone experience of Gledhill Stainless steel thermal store cylinders?

Talk Electrician Forum

Help Support Talk Electrician Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Joined
Nov 28, 2009
Messages
14,673
Reaction score
828
I recently wired a new heating system (someone else did the plumbing)

It is a Gledhill thermal store cylinder heated by both an oil boiler and a wood burning stove. All the heating side of it is working fine.

The problem is the hot water. This tank uses a heat exchanger and a pump to draw heat from the tank to heat the domestic hot water as it passes through the plate heat exchanger. All the electrician has to do with this bit is provide 230V power to a control box supplied with the cylinder.

Well it does not work, and the manufacturer is being slow, seeming to want to follow a fault find by random part swapping policy. And the customer is losing patience.

So I am wondering if anyone understands a bit more about how these work.

There is a Wilo variable speed pump (2 inputs power and PWM speed signal) a water flow switch and another unknown sensor on the cold water in to the heat exchanger.

When a hot tap is turned on, a relay on the control board goes click, the green light on the pump comes on and for a second or 2 noise is heard suggesting the pump starts, but it almost immediately stops, shortly after the green light goes out and becomes a brief flash of the green light every few seconds.

So the pump is not pumping so no hot water drawn from the cylinder into the heat exchanger. The flow switch must work as the relay clicks and that provides power to the pump. I guess my immediate question is what is this other sensor? Cold water in pressure? It's a small cylindrical sensor silver in colour 2 wires connect it to the control board.

The manufacturer seems bogged down trying to blame the plumbing and air locks but both me and the plumber cannot see how that is the case, particularly as where they suspect an air lock is a pre plumbed part of the cylinder.

Any ideas? we keep thinking this should be simple, we must be missing something so obvious we have not checked it.
 
Wondering if the sensor on the cold input is a flow sensor, as used on some combi boilers. Could be a small turbine device with a magnet producing pulses to indicate flow.
 
Yes that is the cylinder.

See the fault finding chart pn page 37. Pump not running and slow flashing green light (no red light) is not listed and when I questioned their technical help line they did not know what the fault was.

The pump is a Wilo Para Ku15/7-50/IPWM2 When I searched Wilo's website it seemed to deny all knowledge of any Ku series pump

I am still waiting for the next response from the manufacturer. We have asked them to send their own engineer with a full set of parts to fix if. Their reply is our location is too remote, to which the customer has said then we will reject the cylinder and return it.
 
Thanks, very useful information.

One of they things they asked me to do was "bell out the PWM cable" but that assumed I had some probes with me small enough to go in the tiny pins of the PWM connector, which I did not, and assumed I had a wiring diagram to bell it out to, which I did not. At the PCB end it connects to a molex connector with just a few pins used. Even if I had belled it out, how would I know this cable assembly had even been made correctly? One possible cause of this problem is the molex end of the cable is connected wrong.
 
Do you have a 0-12v signal generator? I have used one before to imitate the signal and see if pump runs, although you may need a scope as I thinks this is pulsed signal rather than constant?
 
I have a scope (an old one) and I have an audio signal generator that on square wave might just produce something that the pump would find acceptable but I don't have anything that would generate a true PWM signal.

But this kit is supposed to be installed by an electrician and a plumber, not an electronics engineer to find the fault with what should be a pre assembled and tested working system.

At least this forum has got us closer to understanding the issue, a problem with the PWM signal, than the manufacturer has so far achieved. Whether that is a cable issue or a board issue remains to be seen.
 
Have you tried the factory reset?
Reading up it seems that the issue is specifically the pwm signal perhaps measure in and out, I presume you have disconnected and reconnected (until it clicks) the pwm cable.
Also are you on correct mode? Mode 2 is the option you should be on. (From first link)
 
I am not on site at the moment, but I don't recall seeing any button or buttons on the pump, and no row of 3 lights to show selected mode or speed. All I have seen is just a single LED in the middle of the pump, the one that is steady or flashing green.
 
Top