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Immersion heater replacements and thermostats

Immersion heater replacements

Immersion heater replacements may be needed if you have a hot water cylinder and you suddenly experience a loss of hot water. Your cylinder is, for all intense and purpose, a huge kettle, and we all know that a kettle element will become covered in limescale and eventually need to be descaled. Unfortunately this is not possible with a hot water cylinder unless you have a water softener installed to eradicate the limescale build up, and over time the limescale will weaken the element and it will crack rendering it useless. However if you do experience an issue with the immersion heater it can sometimes be down to a faulty thermostat which is a fairly straightforward procedure to replace and requires no plumbing, a simple electrical test will reveal the nature of the issue. 

If jointing compound has been used to make the immersion thread watertight then the old immersion can be extremely difficult to remove and in some cases if care isn’t exercised the cylinder can become cracked in the process of removing it, so it can be a lengthy process removing the old immersion element. If pipe thread tape has been used making the joint then the part should be fairly easy to remove.

Time guide

If jointing compound has been used to seal the thread on the faulty unit then a replacement immersion can take three hours or more hours to replace, If PTFE tape has been used to seal the thread then it may be replaceable within a few hours.