Norwood Surgery
Today we are in the Auckland Surgery, Norwood, London. It is a busy doctors practice serving the local community and is always buzzing with patients. Our GP customers had a maintenance contract with one of the major gas companies (with a ‘British’ in their name) and over the years they had become a bit disillusioned with the conflicting advice and multiple warning notices their engineering staff had given. Most involved ventilation, and a considerable amount of time and effort had been expended by our client in meeting the ever more dramatic requests. As a result, the Potterton Kingfisher II boiler […]
Relocating all the equipment in the cellar
Our customer, near Woolwich, in South East London, has a charming Victorian house in a quiet residential street. There is a substantial cellar that has recently been lowered and made more usable. Our brief was to find a way of moving all boiler and hot water cylinder equipment into the basement, to enable the upper floor to be remodelled, the kitchen enlarged and also a possible loft extension to take place. Ideally, the boiler would be fitted in the basement, together with a new mains pressure unvented cylinder. This presented us with a set of problems, mainly in terms of […]
A cold chill for Fordcombe CoE Primary School
Today we’re near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to look at Fordcombe Primary Church of England School. Our brief was to get the heating working properly in the main building. Our customer had experienced ongoing problems over the past few years with radiators not heating up properly – or at all – and were having to rely on numerous electric heaters to supplant the failing system. In the main classroom, half the radiators didn’t work. Efforts from their maintainer had amounted to little or no improvement, and involved changing the thermostat and a few other misguided remedies. The customer had obtained two […]
Listed Building in Kent gets a new boiler and 12 zone iPhone control
The brief was to replace an old Potterton boiler in the basement with a new unit, and make the system more efficient. Spread over 3 floors and a cellar, this building is Grade 2 listed, and therefore represents a challenge when alterations to building services are required. We looked into replacing the boiler in the cellar with a modern condensing unit, and relining the chimney. However, there were adjacent chimney pots that were in use, and also there were plans for the cellar which meant that our customer would prefer the boiler to be resited to an otherwise unused store […]
Mono Evohome gets switched into Colour Evohome – plus 35% saving on gas bills
Our customer, a music composer and publisher, had engaged ourselves to replace their Ideal Classic boiler for a new Worcester Bosch 15Ri in early 2013, and asked for the new Honeywell Evohome to be fitted when it was launched this year (2014). We returned to service the boiler and upgrade the Evohome Mono (as it is now called) to the new Colour version, and add hot water control to the Megaflo HW cylinder. The new colour controller with iPhone control offers 12 zones instead of 8, so most rooms in this property are now individually temperature controlled. A confessed gadget […]
Listed building gets a new boiler and Evohome zoning
Our customer bought a fantastic building constructed in 1868, located in Carshalton, Surrey. Listed inside and outside, it was built to the requirements of the author Mark Rutherford (real name William Hale White). It incorporates many interesting features, for instance the inside walls are three bricks thick, because Mr White required silence and solitude in his work. The chimneys were all internal to the building, to minimise heat loss. A Victorian eco house, no less. We were asked to upgrade the existing installation of heating, which dated back to the 1980s. Although the radiators and pipework were in reasonable condition, […]
Worcester Bosch Warm Air?
Interesting split level house in Kenley For this post we are in the hills of Kenley. Surrey (UK). Our customer has recently bought this house, which is on four levels and was constructed in the early 1970s. The brief was to renew the warm air system (the customer did not want radiators) but put in a more efficient system that could also heat up a much larger hot water cylinder quickly. The existing system used a Lennox gas warm air heater and an electric heated hot water cylinder. The customer had noticed that although there was a prominent air duct […]
Warm air and radiators, one property, one boiler
For this post, we are in Fetcham, in the area of Leatherhead, Surrey. Our customer had a 1970s house that has been comprehensively updated, including a significant extension which was built around 12 yrs ago with radiators. The existing part of the property retained the original warm air heating, in this case using an old Lennox G8 unit under the hallway stairs. Hot water was provided by a conventional cylinder, this was heated by the boiler being used for radiators, a Baxi Solo 3, in the garage. The warm air unit had been the subject of various warning notices over […]
Large old listed country house – 155Kw boiler system renewal
We’ve just replaced the boiler plant in a very large country residence in Sussex (July 2013). The old oil fired Worcester Bosch system heated the house, which was mainly comprised of 60 yr old radiators and large bore steel pipe, as an entire single entity without any zone control. The oil bill (no mains gas here) was £12K per annum. Our customer looked at a number of options, but liked our approach best. Our unique proposal was to improve the efficiency of the boiler room by using weather compensation and load sharing – reduce consumption of oil and increase comfort, […]
Hometronic system transforms comfort in Godalming property
Godalming is a beautifully rural part of Surrey, UK. This house in located in an isolated position, and was purchased by the present owners a couple of years ago. One of the things that had never been successful with this lovely house was the heating. Radiators worked, then they didn’t work at all, seemingly at random. There were a few electric and LPG heaters evident when I did the home survey – it was a cold house. Our customer is a senior creative figure in the electronic gaming arts industry, and he wanted to have zone based control of […]
