Thanks Bob. My apologies I didn't thank you at the time... I was busy doing just as you'd said.
Results were good to start, I 'rinsed and repeated' and have been tinkering and learning, but feel like I've gone right back to square one. I'm now brewing Coopers lager in kit form, and either adding the priming sugar to my bottling vat before bottling, or adding straight to the bottles I'm now using (I change it because of the following...) I've then put the bottles under the stairs where the boiler is, (in this colder time of the year, I thought that was the right thing to do) for a week or even 2 (due to the failures I've had), and then into the garage for a week even 2. Then into a beer fridge in the garage.
Beer tastes right, but there's very little carbonation. I'm using plastic bottles still (bought the water ones, but then replaced them with ones from a home-brew site) mainly new, so I know the seals are still fair, and I'm seeing the white traces that would indicate to this newbie that something has happened in the bottles. I get good pressure in the bottles between warm and cool... they are hard before I move them to the garage, but then when I come to move them to the fridge, they're flat.
I'm at a complete loss. I'm wondering whether its the weather, and/ or the fact I've only been doing this 5 months so I don't have the experience to do different things in Winter or not... I've even thought it might be that I've switched the type of sugar from Tate and Lyle to some slightly cheaper Aldi equivalent but then I switched back and had no success.
Any help that anyone can offer would be gratefully appreciated as I've checked many forums and can't find the same problems exactly.
Thanks in advance.
C