Barn conversion near Tonbridge, Kent

Here we find ourselves down a rural unmarked lane in Kent, the site of a large barn conversion. It comprises a two storey hallway, and many original features. Much of the house is already underfloor heated, using an L&K system with around 14 separately controlled zones. What makes this system unusual is the various heat sources used to create the heating and hot water. There’s two fuel burning stoves, some solar thermal on the rooftop, and a Rayburn solid fuel stove. This was all installed by the present owners, who were almost singlehandedly responsible for the design and execution around […]
Move boiler to cellar and convert to unvented hot water

We are in the Camberwell area, close to London. Our customers have a lovely Victorian house, but unfortunately, the boiler and the hot water cylinder are in a cupboard in the master bedroom. This makes the room unnecessarily warm in the summer, and of course, you can hear the boiler operating. Our customers wished, if possible, to relocate the boiler into the cellar area. Unfortunately the cellar area was underground, with no apertures to ground level, and it had no drainage. And restricted headroom. So that’s all good then. We found a small bookcase in the hallway that had originally […]
Grade II listed building condensing boiler using chimney

Today we are in a house in a beautiful part of the Garden of England, in other words, Kent. The house is in a small village reminiscent of the one filmed many years ago for a Hovis advert, with cobbled streets and high pavements. Our customer had bought a house with an old Potterton Osprey light commercial in the cellar, and British Gas had said that many parts were no longer available. Other contractors had suggested the only options involved siting a new boiler on an external wall; this would have resulted in lots of unwanted visible pipework but also […]
Improving water supply and Acorn heating pipework issues

Our customer lives in a remote rural location near Warlingham, in Surrey, UK. They asked us to provide a proposal to update their old Grant boiler. Interestingly, it had rotted through a few years previously, and their heating technician had located a comparatively healthy heat secondhand heat exchanger in Cornwall, which he had successfully fitted. The ladder type steel radiators suffered from perpetual air and some had stopped working, others had lost the upper sections and were partially cold, something which venting could not cure. I was intrigued because although the system was fitted with a header tank, there was […]
Remove Ideal iStor boiler and fit super new Viessmann and Fabdec system

We’ve published a similar story here before, which is one of the reasons why our customer in this case study called us. He recently bought a relatively new property (2011) with an Ideal iStor on the second floor, it wasn’t working properly, and he had been advised that it had been a money pit since virtually day one. The other reason he got in contact with Hot Water & Central Heating Ltd was that he had used us for boiler installation before, in this case around 11 years ago (not in this house!). A refreshing number of our early customers […]
Fabdec unvented cylinder, cows, – and mother in laws – in Minehead

In our industry, there are few genuine innovations. When you look behind the hype, very little is new. The unvented mains pressure hot water cylinder existed for years on the continent, but in the UK it has only been permitted for domestic applications since 1986! This is because storing significant quantities of pressurised hot water brings certain risks, the one people get excited about being explosion. Unvented cylinders deliver mains direct hot and cold services to all outlets in the house, dispensing with the need for a water tank in the loft. They are typically the next stage up in […]