Hot Water & Central Heating Blog » School (iron) radiators

A few more School Iron Rads

admin — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:53:08 +0000

We’re in Outwood today, taking out some old panel radiators for a an oil boiler customer you will find on our blog a few years ago. We don’t normally fit radiators etc unless we have a boiler replacement, but in this case we’d already replaced the boiler some years earlier!

Drawing room

Our client has had a lovely oak floor laid and our mission was to replace the old radiators with refurbished iron units, and connect them to his Hometronic energy management system.

Large one in the hall, extremely heavy!

One of two in the lounge

Vaillant boiler and back to school radiators

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:08:44 +0000

This house, in Oxted, Surrey, was in need of a new boiler.

The old unit, a Potterton Kingfisher, was located in the rear of the main kitchen, and was going to be in the way of a planned refurbishment.

There were very few places to fit the boiler, so we eventually settled on a restricted location near the back doorway. A Vaillant ecoTEC plus 630 High Efficiency unit was selected, as the build quality of these units is very good, and they are particulary quiet, featuring an insulated casing.

Vaillant ecoTEC plus 630 system boiler

The pipework had to run a long way through store cupboards etc and was sized at 28mm for maximum flow rate. In the cupboard areas insulation was applied.

Our customer rather fancied some period radiators for her reception rooms, so we procured some customer made refurbished school radiators from our supplier, in a superb gunmetal finish. Last year we fitted 28 of these units in a house in Tandridge, and our backs have only just healed.

School radiator, supplied and installed by HWCH

School radiator in the lounge

These radiators really lift a room.

Best of all they are truly recycled. These are the ‘greenest radiators’ you can buy.

Local councils are taking them out of schools and institutions and throwing them away, replacing them with tin radiators that will be rusted and dented in a few years. On one hand they play around with coloured recycling bins, and on the other they are destroying radiators that would still be giving good service in 100 years time.

Kidd Boiler in renovation of large house in Tandridge, Surrey

admin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:20:15 +0000

The Kidd boiler was very popular in the early years (1982 onwards) with people in the music industry, many of whom were pioneers of environmental awareness. Abba, Peter Gabriel and the Alan Parsons Project are some notable customers of Kidd Boilers over the years.

Inside a Kidd Model 260 – stripped down, preparing for lifting

In a recently completed installation in Oxted, Surrey, we had to lower a Kidd Model 260 into an internal boiler room of a large private house.

There was no space for a conventional crane, and to install a lifting hoist would have required some quite complex scaffolding.

So we used a Genie tower lift, more often used in the rock and roll event lighting industry (where I used to work, many years ago), to lower the 350kg boiler into the cellar and lift the old boilersout. There were three old boilers in the cellar, two operational and one from a bygone era which was obviously to heavy to remove when it died.

Going down! the Kidd Boiler is winched into the cellar through a very tight opening (stairs removed)

The boiler flue will emit large quantities of plume and steam, being a high efficiency condensing boiler. A new Kidd alumimium flue liner was inserted into the boiler room chimney.

Going up -one of the old boilers being lifted out

This installation also involved HWCH in the removal and refurbishment of 26 cast iron radiators, which were shotblasted and reconfigured in new sizes by our contractor. Finished in a mixture of white and metallic bronze, they look truly stunning.

refurbished School radiator and custom coloured Hometronic valve

The house was completely replumbed in a mixture of steel barrel and copper tubing.

Interestingly, only one electrical pump is used for the whole installation. HWCH and Kidd Boilers believe that pumps waste heat and electrical energy, and many larger houses can have 4 or 5 pumps all working to raise the electricity bill and contribute heat losses.

The Kidd Boiler uses an internal Grundfos pump, inside all the boiler insulation. Any heat losses from the pump (both from electrical and latent heat) are thus recycled back into the boier jacket proper. As Mr Kidd says, it is foolish to waste heat. Mr Kidd always expects a Kidd Boiler room to be a cool one.

Finally, we fitted the Honeywell Hometronic building management system to the house, enabling 16 homeowner-configured heating zones to be controlled completely separately.

Each radiator was fitted with a Honeywell radio linked motorised valve (those fitted to the bronze radiators were specially colour matched), 42 in total.

School radiator fitted with Hometronic valve

Another example, this time with a bronze Hometronic valve (special order from Hot Water & Central Heating)

The house is also equipped with two DualStream accumulator pressurised hot/cold water systems. One covers the main house, the other, the guest bathrooms.

The Honeywell Hometronic energy management system is furnished with 10 configurable ‘Lifestyle’ buttons. When our customer has guests staying, they simply press the corresponding button and the heating adapts to encompass guest bedrooms, upper hallway temperatures rise, reception rooms are heating for longer periods, and the second DualStream hot water system is energised.

All clever stuff, but with an end game. With an older house, there is a limit to how much you can insulate against heat loss. Although we fitted one of the most efficient boilers available, further savings can be achieved by using your heat more productively, when and where it is needed. Hometronic takes it to the next level.

With oil pushing 60p a litre, you simply can’t afford to waste it.