This unit replaced an old Ideal Standard cast iron boiler in a storage room.  The Ideal Standard WM series unit was a bit long in the tooth, and was probably only 65% efficient.

We specified a 12Kw Worcester Bosch Ri replacement, which can achieve an efficiency of over 90% when used on a like – for – like basis.

New boiler (insulation to pipework not applied when photo taken)

The Worcester was mounted in a similar position to the old unit, but first we had to brick up the large flue aperture remaining from the previous boiler. 

The next door neighbour had recently had their boiler replaced by another contractor, who had elected use cement instead of bricks!   Hope it was a very cheap job!

The scene outside

A new Honeywell radio thermostat, and a new two channel timer was installed.

New Honeywell Line-of-text heating and hot water programmer

As usual, the system was comprehensively power flushed and our customer benefits from a reasonably priced, quality installation, warranted by Worcester Bosch until April 2014.

Completed in early April 2009, this customer’s house, on the Sanderstead/Purley borders (Surrey, UK) had an aged Potterton boiler removed and changed for a new wall hung Worcester Bosch 24Ri.

Who left that van there?

The new boiler was a third of the size and weight of the old unit, but had exactly the same power output.

The old cast iron unit had been very reliable, but extremely wasteful of gas.  Old floorstanding cast iron units rarely give an efficiency of greater than 65%. 

A new high efficiency boiler will achieve around 90% efficiency.

In other words, comparing the old boiler to the new one, for every £1.00 you spend on gas, 25p is immediately lost, forever.

And of course, if you are using less gas, your household emissions will lower, and there will be considerably more gas left for everyone else.

Inside the utility room

The only losers are the people selling you the energy in the first place…….. 

Getting back to our installation picture file, the old boiler had an enormous balanced flue which we painstakingly bricked up to match the existing….. if you look closely you may be able to see.

Completed job, spot the brickwork remedial work

Our customer’s boiler is warranted through our preferential arrangement with Worcester Bosch, until April 2014.

We spent 3 days in this loft

Our customer in Purley had a boiler fitted by Hot Water & Central Heating in 2005, and was in the process of having a bathroom refitted. 

Vaillant ecoTEC installed in 2005 - as good as new

Their old gravity water system cylinder was in the way of a new shower enclosure.

Old gravity cylinder - recycling beckons

We worked alongside their bathroom installers (Visions) to swap over from a vented bathroom setup to a new unvented cylinder in the loft. 

Tim holding up the uniSTOR 260

Our customer is a retired chemical engineer, and he specified one of the first Vaillant weather compensated heating systems when we originally installed his Vaillant ecoTEC 630 boiler in 2005.

Naturally, he decided to go for a Vaillant unvented cylinder, in this case the uniSTOR 260.  He now has what Vaillant describe a ‘total system solution’.  This is where the boiler controls know the precise hot water temperature in the cylinder, and modulate the boiler output according to the scale of the task. 

In a Vaillant total system solution there is no separate timer and programmer, all the heating and hot water is controlled from a single wall mounted controller.  We had fitted a Vaillant VRC400 back in 2005, but recently this has been superceded by the new VRC430, and as this was an inexpensive upgrade, our customer chose to have the newer model fitted at the same time.

Latest Vaillant controller was installed

The uniSTOR was sited in the loft space, involving a considerable amount of pipework and subsequent lagging.

There was a surprising amount of pipework in this job

We also upgraded the water supply from the garage, to give the best possible performance at the taps.

New water pipe (insulated) in garage on its way to the loft

Connected to a suitable water supply, unvented hot and cold water systems give a performance level similar to that obtained from a shower pump without the noise and unreliability associated with the latter.

Finished job

They have to be installed by a qualified installer and the safety devices suitably installed;  in our case, we ran the emergency discharge pipe in 28mm copper in a discrete corner of the property, rather than using the nearer back of the house, which would have been unsightly.

Discharge pipe was run at side of house

There was a time when a backboiler (a gas fire with a hidden cast iron central heating boiler hidden inside the fireplace) was the height of fashion.

Unfortunately, the front fires now look dated, but more importantly, the bit at the back is usually only 60%-65% efficient in its use of your expensive gas.

Our customer in Pembury (near Tunbridge Wells, Kent) had decided it was time to invest in a new energy efficient boiler, and from the 3 quotes, he chose Hot Water & Central Heating for the task.

The boiler was to be moved from the lounge to a utility room area, in the process of being refurbished.

We suggested the Worcester Bosch 18Ri conventional boiler, which has an efficiency of over 90%, and comes with a full 5 year warranty when fitted by Hot Water & Central Heating.

The new boiler

The Worcester 18Ri has a depth of only 280mm, meaning that it will fit in a standard wall cupboard – which is handy, because our customer will be having new units on this wall.   The boiler will be completely hidden when renovations are completed.

In this case, we were fortunate to have the boiler on an outside wall, which made fitting so much simpler.

New boiler location, from the outside, showing neat flue outlet

Our customer had an old Glowworm boiler which was in a position preventing a planned extension to the house.

The object of our works, on the Purley/Coulsdon borders

HWCH Ltd were recommended by another customer, and we suggested replacing the boiler with a modern Vaillant ecoTEC 630 system boiler.

The Vaillant ecoTEC+ 630 is a 30Kw boiler (102,000 BTu output) with an integral 2 speed pump, all mounted in a modern near-silent enclosure.

We give 5 year warranties on our Vaillant boilers, which, along with the recommendation, no doubt helped win us this contract.

New Vaillant boiler in utility room

The customer had originally carried his own central heating installation over 20 years ago, and a very fine job he had made of it.  In fact, it looked nothing like a typical DIY installation, we were very impressed.

We relocated the boiler from a WC to a utility room, and provided modern programmable Honeywell thermostatic controls, which enabled the house to be zoned into two areas.

Wiring up the new Honeywell zone valves

The boiler will be covered by a 5yr parts and labour warranty until 2013.  If your Vaillant boiler installer does not give you this, perhaps you should be calling us for a quote!

ºOur customer has a large 3 storey Victorian detached property in Dulwich.

In common with many houses in this area, an old gravity fed hot and cold water system using loft tanks was employed. 

Our customer wished to gradually update his house to new mains pressure fed bathrooms, using European high pressure taps, and wisely didn’t fancy the prospect of shower pumps.

He also wanted to make use of the loft space currently occupied by the large water tanks, and remove the old copper hot water storage cylinder on the 1st floor to make room for another shower.

Our brief was to design the plant to deliver his requirements, all within a cellar a little under 6 feet tall.

In the cellar we found a venerable Kidd Boiler, dating from 1990, so this was retained as it probably has a good few years of life left in it.   Launched in 1982, it was an early condensing high efficiency design that remarkably few ‘heating engineers’ have heard of to this day, even though it was probably the first commercial British condensing boiler.  Still made today, we still fit them!

Kidd Boiler Model 2 Gas (now available in white!)

I commonly hear ‘how reliable’ someone’s old Potterton has been……….  if they had fitted a Kidd instead 20 years ago it would have been just as reliable but burnt just over half the fuel in the intervening 20 years.  Notables including the Highgrove Estate and Peter Gabriel were savvy enough to understand the importance of not wasting fuel back then, but that’s another story….

We had to boost the water flow rate from the 20 litres a minute provided by Thames Water to in excess of 40 litres per minute.  We did this with a stored water pressure vessel.

We then needed a hot water storage system that could fit below the low ceiling, but have a fast recovery time in the event of concerted use.  We looked into a heatstore, but the costs of having a special unit fabricated to meet the space restrictions were very high.  Also the Kidd Boiler does not modulate, so ideally we would need a heatstore with a 46Kw plate heat exchanger to enable the boiler to discharge its power in a long burn, rather than a protracted series of short cycles, which wastes energy needlessly.

We ended up specifying the ACV Smartline tank in tank ‘unvented’ cylinder instead.  To those of you who think of a Megaflo when unvented cylinders are mentioned, this is a World apart.

ACV cylinder cutaway

The stainless steel water cylinder containing your hot water is suspended within another steel cylinder containing the boiler heated water.  When the water is heated it is surrounded 360° by the boiler water, resulting in a very fast warm up time indeed. 

So our Kidd Boiler can discharge it’s full output of 46Kw into the ACV cylinder, resulting in a quick heat recovery period.

The ACV cylinder has another trick;  although it is an unvented cylinder, it is designed to store water at 80ºC, rather than the 60ºC usually used.  The reason we normally store hot water at 60C is that at temperatures above this, limescale is precipitated from the water and deposits scale.  The ACV inner cylinder is ribbed, and every water draw off causes a movement, this prevents scale from building up.  The electrical immersion heater is fitted to the other jacket, so never scales up.

The result is that we can store more hot water energy in an ACV cylinder than an equivalent sized alternative, and most boilers will work more efficiently when driving them. 

Water Boosting Vessel and ACV Smartline hot water unvented cylinder

The equipment was all mounted well below drainage level, so a Drainmaster high temperature compatible pumpset was fitted.  The Kidd Boiler used to disharge its condense into a plastic 2 gallon drum (nobody manufactured condensate pumps in the 80s and 90s, so this was a common bodge), but now it can use the Drainmaster, along with a soon to be fitted sink, washing machine and of course the emergency discharge from the unvented system.  The Drainmaster is a pump in a vented sump, and is hot water rated for these types of application.

The outside Kidd flue had been damaged by builders, so we commissioned a new hand welded item from Kidd Boilers  (Mr Kidd, as usual, had the original installation drawings on file)

Finally, the latest Honeywell programmable room heating controller (CM927) was added to the installation to bring it up to date.

Honeywell Programmable room thermostst

We think the showers are now almost too painful to get under……..  but some of our customers like them like that!

Our customer premises

Our client, an independent church ministry, occupy a building in the Nutfield region of Surrey, near Redhill.

Their original boiler was a Potterton Suprima, a model which enjoyed high sales between approximately 1995 and 2004.  Unfortunately, it also featured regularly on BBC’s Watchdog programme, due to some alleged design defects which result in the circuit boards needing frequent replacement.

This unit failed for a diffferent reason.  The Suprima can have a long flue run, if the optional Potterton twin pipe system is employed.  Our customer had such an installation, running from the airing cupboard mounted boiler, through a large loft space, to a vertical flue terminal on the rear side of the pitched roof.

Condensation had formed inside the flue (which a Potterton Suprima is not constructed to deal with, as it is a non condensing boiler), which had run back down the pipe inside the combustion area of the boiler, where it was trapped, and rotted the casing.  Result, a total write off. 

Having checked our Potterton archive, the flue was installed correctly by the original builder, so this appears to be another Suprima instance of an under developed and tested product being introduced to market.  Luckily, very few Suprimas were equipped with this type of twin pipe flue system, but if yours was, you may want to get it checked over before a dangerous situation develops.

We recommended that the new boiler, a Vaillant ecoTEC+ 624, was sited in the roof space.  The new boiler is a high efficiency condensing type, and needs a drain attached, which was not available in the airing cupboard.

Vaillant system boiler in loft space

The installed system of radiators used microbore plumbing, so was unable to be Powerflushed clean due to the frictional resistance of the pencil thin pipe.  Heating companies have been known to connect their powerflush machines to microbore, but it is utterly pointless, because the flow of water through the radiators is so small it does not have an agitating or cleansing effect.

To help protect the boiler from dirt and rust contamination in the old pipework, we fitted the latest ‘TwinTech’ from Adey systems, this captures ferrous material with a magnetic rod, and non ferrous detritus in a filter.  This unit, seen in purple underneath the boiler, is the new upgraded version of the old Adey ‘Magnaclean’ filter.

The flue was run through the loft space (shown temporarily supported here) to a new vertical terminal on the roof. 

Vaillant flue inside loft area

Scaffolding was needed here due to the roof having no apex but a hidden flat top, so roof ladders could not be used.

The neatest jobs are the ones you can't see

New Honeywell 907 thermostat in hall

Inside a Vaillant 6 series ecoTEC+

View with control panel down

HWCH’s customer had a rather ugly old boiler mounted in a cupboard in the kitchen.

Old boiler in kitchen

This unit had to go, as a refurbishment was imminent.  We recommended fitting a Vaillant boiler in the utility room.

New Vaillant boiler in utility room

The Vaillant 428 is a small open vented boiler which is designed especially for the UK market, where we often have a small radiator tank in the loft.

The boiler flue from a modern high efficiency unit discharges plume, a condensation laden steam effect rather like an old train.  Building Regulations and good neighbour relations mean that we have to be mindful in which direction this discharges.

We used the Vaillant ‘Variable Flue termination kit’ accessory to run the steam output all the way up the side of the house and discharge it safely and aesthetically, vertically next to the roof.

It was an awkward site next to a window and a gutter

The flue matches the rainwater goods in size and colour.

Spot the boiler flue

Finished job

Our client has bought a 1960s house in the well regarded village of Woldingham, Surrey, and embarked on a major remodelling of all services and interiors.

When finished, the building will incorporate a modern kitchen, and comprehensively remodelled interiors.

We have assisted our customer in the selection of the heating system, but they have also contributed much to the specification, including the innovative Jaga Strada ‘low H20′ high efficiency radiators.

HWCH will be fitting a large underfloor heating grid on the ground floor, a 46Kw Viessmann 200 series light commercial boiler, accumulator boosted DualStream hot and cold water system, all controlled by the Honeywell Hometronic radiator and underfloor control system.

The industrial gas meter has been moved as part of the works, and our commercial gas engineer will be installing a new underground service to the house and swimming pool boilers.

Work is expected to finish in early 2009, but for now,here are some photographs;

Viessmann 46Kw boiler in utility room

Part of the underfloor heating grid just installed

Cylinder cupboard 35mm pipework under test

From the kitchen...........

This customer was having a large extension fitted on the rear of the property, in the form of a wooden Amdega conservatory.

We suggested that water based underfloor heating would be far cheaper to run, and more effective than the electric matting recommended by the conservatory builder.

New Amdega conservatory - underfloor heating by HWCH

The old 50Kw Potterton commercial boiler was removed and replaced with a top quality Viessmann 300 49Kw system boiler with KM bus varispeed pump.

Viessmann 300 49Kw in utility room

The house suffered from inadequate heating in the triple aspect bedroom and lounge, and also the large number of rooms meant that heat was being wasted during the day when some of the family were at school.

Repiping the areas into separately controllable zones was not a practical option, so we fitted the Hometronic radiator/UFH management system.  This allows the customer to set temperatures differently throughout the house in up to 16 separate zones, throughout the day/week.

Radiator fitted with Hometronic valve (a bit blurred!)

The lounge is treated as a separate zone, so if the customer has set the temperature to 20C for the evening, the radiators will come on as frequently as necessary, without affecting the rest of the house. 

Hometronic controller for heating and hot water

The conservatory is now lovely and warm, and the Viessmann boiler is saving lots of gas compared to the old inefficient Potterton unit.