Central Heating

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I'm a Plumber and I'm not too proud to use this book - Rated
Despite being in the trade and we're supposed to know what we're doing, we all have the odd "bad day at the office" and this book has been invaluable to me. I have nipped out to the van "to get something i forgot" more than once and had a quick read and digest session as a reminder. Well worth the price if it gets you out of a hole just the once when it's getting late in the day and the customer wants the heating back on 'cos its cold out.

Your own plumber available 24/7! - Rated
This is a musthave book. As a keen DIY plumber,I am constantly looking for ways to improve my knowledge of central heating and hot water systems as well as fault finding and diagnosis, and this book hits the nail firmly on the head. Within 20 minutes of owning my copy I had resolved a problem that had been nagging for several weeks!

The spiral binding is also a godsend, particularly when you're in the loft or the airing cupboard!

An excellent reference - Rated
This taught me loads of things I had expected to learn on my NVQ course but didn't - and some of it was new to the tutors as well!! (Backfilling a sluggish system saved me hours of frustration with radiators that wouldn't fill).
This book pulls together a lot of very useful information from various sources, combines it with a practical approach to diagnosis gained from years of experience, and puts it all together in one place in a logical, structured way.
It really "does what it says on the tin", basically covering in some detail:
1) What Central Heating is
2) What can go wrong with it
3) How to diagnose the fault
4) How to repair it
Fault finding diagrams are v. useful.
This book will be invaluable for DIYer and professional. Okay, if you've been in the business for 40 years you probably know all that's in here (and more), but then you wouldn't be looking for a book like this, would you?
To the rest of us, buy it now and keep it in the van!!

From Zero to Hero - Rated
I am not by nature a plumber.

I live in a two bedroomed apartment with a gas powered central heating system, which I inherited when I bought the place (my first) four years ago.

When it starting playing up I did what most people do, I ignored it.

Eventually, I had to either call out a plumber before it stopped working altogether or figure out why the pilot was lit but the place was cold.

I used the technique that I learnt in my younger days. A technique that I learnt to use to fix my first two cars . I bought the equivalent of the Haynes manual.

Haynes don't do a Central Heating Manual but these people do and whilst it doesn't have the oily photograph so that you can see exactly what the part really looks like, it covers the range of systems, rather than one model in an easy to understand way.

Took me back to the days when I replaced the piston on my Suzuki TS100 and got a re-bore. When I had finished, it worked.

A great book that I will make oily myself in time.

Don't waste your money - Rated
I confess to being very disappointed with this book. In places the text is disjointed and hard to read. However, my main complaint is with the diagrams. Very few of the diagrams have legends, and the text does not contain references to the legends. Therefore it is very hard to relate the diagrams to the text. Even if it were possible to relate the diagrams, I suspect that in most cases it would be useless. This is because the same diagrams are repeated endlessly throughout the book, in the few cases where there are minor differences in the diagrams they are very hard to spot, and the differences seem to bear no relationship to the surrounding text. In fact, this is so bad that I suspect that it must be a publishing and proofing error rather than the authors intention. The fault finding charts are reasonable but are no different to those found in many other DIY plumbing books. Don't waste your money!