Hello

[MicraShed]

Hello

I have wandered over here to the plumbing forum the sparkies forum. I have a background in electrical engineering, but this was a long time ago and for the last 20 odd years I have been a nurse and work erratic shifts. I renovated my current property so have a rough idea about plumbing and wiring - that said I wont be attempting to replace the heating system myself, someone else can have that pleasure.

Anyway, after installing Solar PV and a proportional hot water heating device, I now turn to the gas central heating which is starting to get a bit creaky and is eating gas - the use has leapt from 13kWh/day to 33kWh / day for the same period, when all that is on is the hot water.

I did try to post a long detailed post on the central heating forum but it wont let me, something about banned words? The only thing I can see are brand names. I dont swear (unless at work).

 

[MicraShed]

The House:
4 bed Semi (garage conversion to bed number 4) extended. 7 radiators.
Cavity wall insulation
200+ mm lost insulation
Double glazed, part under floor insulation

The Current System:
1995 B4xi Solo 2 (RS) 40,000BTU boiler (tweaked to nearer 50,000 BTU output) Located in the kitchen running a Grundfos pump (2011) to a 22mm manifold running around the upper floor of the house dropping to 15mm to feed the radiators. The pipes and rads were replaced in 2006 from huge leaky rads and 10mm micro bore pipe.

 

[MicraShed]

Hot water is served by a 1995 Primatic cylinder located in the bathroom about a hundred miles from the boiler (in reality a pipe run of about 55 feet of 22mm pipe)

Heating controls are all thermostatic - all rads bar one run TRV's, there is a room stat set to a minimum of 17 degrees and maximum of 24 degrees and a cylinder stat set to 60 degrees. By means of a power relay and some messing I concocted there are no time switches in the circuit - the house and water are maintained at a constant background temp and boosted when needed (I work erratic shifts that a time clock has yet to be invented that could cope with).

 

[MicraShed]

View attachment 8012
Witchcraft Inside


Now this might seem madness and an expensive way of running things, but until the boiler decided it was going to star cycling for the hot water every 10 minutes it wasnt.

Anyway, Im starting to think about a replacement system. Likely starting with the hot water cylinder this year and moving onto the boiler next year. I have no intention of fitting a combi boiler as I feel that these are the work of the devil, plus as I have access to free electricity in the sunny (ha!) weather I can utilise this to heat the hot water.
There was some mention of a non vented hot water system over on the Electricians forum, but having read a bit about these the prospect of several gallons of pressurised near boiling water fills me with the screaming heebie jeebies. However a "Thermal Store" vented type tank looks a lot safer and possibly a better bet to be heated (during the sumer months at least ) from the irregular an unregulated Solar PV, as well as a top up if needed from the gas boiler.

Then we move onto the boiler itself. Ideally I would love to move this from the kitchen to the loft, but the location I had in mind has now been taken over by rather a lot of microgeneration hardware, so I guess it will have to stay in the kitchen - this means still having a quite ridiculously long pipe run. Some of which is insulated, some not. This is an area I know less about than astrophysics, so any thoughts on this at all would be appreciated.

 

[MicraShed]

Discovered what was blocking me posting - who on earth decided that was a banned word?
Apologies for the rather broken up post above.