Crystal Palace, South London, UK, was a Victorian haven for the well to do, formerly known as Sydenham Hill. The area has been named after the amazing glass and iron building designed by Joseph Paxton, which is no longer with us having been destroyed by fire in 1936. The ornamental gardens associated with the huge exhibition area live on in rather reduced grandeur; the two massive water towers which powered the ornamental fountains and survived the fire were dismantled in the 2nd World War because it was believed they were being used as bombing navigational aids.
The area has many superb Victorian houses and one of these is our focus for this posting. The owner had significantly upgraded the interiors a few years ago, and had taken the opportunity to get his builders to fit an unvented cylinder and a Keston condensing boiler. Regular readers of our postings will know where this is going…… The Keston boiler had been unreliable and although it was only a few years old, our customer felt it wasn’t worth persevering any further with.
We did a heat calculation which showed that the unit was oversized at 55Kw, so we recommended a smaller 40Kw boiler, in this case a Worcester-Bosch 40CDi conventional. The gas pipework to the Keston was significantly undersized, which would not have helped matters. When we opened the boiler up, there was significant internal corrosion and blockages.
The house was on four levels and contained a significant number of rooms, the owner decided to take the opportunity to divide the house into smaller zones to save energy. We fitted the Honeywell Hometronic system, which using the existing pipework with no disruption, allowed us to provide 16 separate areas of controllable heating.
While we were there we noticed that the heating firm contracted by the builders had connected up the Megaflo wrongly, so we arranged for this to be sorted.
The Worcester-Bosch boiler was supplied with a 7 yr warranty, under our special terms with the manufacturer, which will give peace of mind until at least 2020!

We bricked up the two redundant flue apertures using similar bricks found in the garden (usually the best place for matching weathered items!) and installed a Worcester-Bosch plume redirection kit. One of our Powerflush machines can be seen at the foot of the stairs.