Update - the heater is fixed (almost).
As some of you had suggested, the heater control valve was faulty. It's held in by 3x jubilee clips and an electrical connected and the two plastic pegs that it pushes into the o-rings with to secure it to the bracket, simple enough really, it's 4 things to release and pull it upwards. Somehow I lost circa 5 hours on this "simple task". WTF??
Anyway, it came out and I could see the swollen rubber in there partially blocking the water gallery so I thought "I've cracked it."
Dismantled it to see what it truly looked like inside and it is in a bad way, the rubber gaskets have completely perished
So I happily fitted the new part, then the diesel filter etc. went back in, topped off the coolant, fired it up and ran it for 15 mins, no heat still! ARGH!
I'd already checked that the matrix was flowing water and it is absolutely fine however there was no water flowing back from the matrix when the car is running, one side has pressure and the other, nothing. The pipe would slowly fill but it was clear we still had a blockage. Studying the system with a friend, he says "Do you know what that valve there does?", I reply "No mate, I can't see a need for another one". We drink yet more tea and bounce ideas for a while. These cars (like so many diesels) have the Webasto type fuel burning heaters in them and it seems that mine is in the NSF arch somewhere, I can see the fuel line for it and the coolant pipes go into there too. From memory, the one we had on our Freelander was triggered by the outside temp being 5ºc or below so I've not had the car at a time when this would be triggered yet.
"shall we take it out and have a look?"
"May as well."
It's a diverter valve for the FBH. Absolutely locked solid and closed. So as it was suggested to me, some coolant will pass a stuck valve (
@Datatek you were correct). When we opened it up, we poured coolant from the solenoid which can't be a good start can it. Although the plunger then moved freely, when built up the valve simply wouldn't flow coolant in either direction. I modified it, with a hacksaw! It flows coolant now!
A new valve was delivered yesterday so that will go in hopefully before the weekend (work dependant) but I now have a working heater so that pretty much closes off the list of jobs that needed to be done on this car. There are still some fettling issues to sort out, I have a broken headlight washer and the front fogs don't work. I don't care about the fogs really other than they are supposed to work. They aren't an MOT failure and I'm not a foglight W****er but they need to be sorted. Might just be a couple of bulbs but I'd rather expect the car to tell me that they had failed, can anyone confirm if there is bulb failure warning on these?
Thanks for following along and for all of your input and support.
