Firstly, I must apologise the lack of photographs here. I have a new iPhone and managed to lose a significant amount of installation photos transferring from the old one. It was all my fault, not Apple’s!
Our customer has a lovely period property near Gatwick, in Sussex. It has a very cold kitchen and lounge, and was a conventional system with water tanks in the loft and a hot water cylinder on the 1st floor.
The boiler was an old Potterton unit on the ground floor at the rear of the property.
Now, these old properties are usually a bit tight on cupboard and bathroom space, so our customer wanted to lose the water tanks and hot water cylinder, add a utility room and ideally compress all the boiler and hot water functions into a small area.
Enter the Worcester-Bosch Highflow 550 CDi. This unit is a hybrid combination boiler, and is identical in size to a washing machine. It has a 42kW heat engine, and an unvented water store inside. That is the ‘hybrid’ bit, because the hot water heatstore makes this boiler deliver flow rates of hot water that could normally only be obtained from an unvented cylinder.
For the first few hundred litres of water, the blending of the preheated store and the real time efforts of the combi boiler engine deliver close to 25 litres of hot water a minute. In real use, the unit recharges its’ heat store very quickly so rarely drops below this output. It is a powerhouse in a small box.
We removed the old water tanks, the old cylinder on the 1st floor, and the ld boiler, and replaced it all with the Bosch unit. This used the same flue aperture outside so did not affect the listed building requirements.
New boiler does everything for a 4 bed house
Significant modifications were made inside to the heating system, with new Vogel & Noot Vienna Line radiators throughout. A Smiths Kickspace fan convector was installed in the kitchen, and pipewor was renewed and upsized in key areas to improve circulation through the radiators.
All pipework in the boiler area was removed from wall ducting and relocated on the ceiling to allow for some new wall openings to be created into the adjacent kitchen.
Checking the combustion settings of the new boiler
As part of a Bosch promotion for Gold Accredited Installers, our customer has the benefit of a 7 year parts and labour warranty on the boiler.
