In our previous post we described the unfortunate experience of my brother in law, in Nantwich, where he had a Worcester-Bosch Danesmoor installed by a registered installer, and got a particularly shoddy job.
This post is hopefully a better example, because it was one of our installations!
Our customer is in the Gatwick area (south east England) and lives in a detached chalet bungalow.
He had an older Worcester 14/19 internal oil boiler, which had developed a problem which rendered it beyond economic repair. It also necessitated removal of a granite worktop whenever anything significant required attention, so our customer said he’d prefer an external model this time around.

An hour later, this boiler was gone. And a whole kitchen unit worth of storage available for other uses.
We suggested he stick with Worcester-Bosch, and fit their new (October 2013>) Greenstar Danesmoor external model. Although it looks similar externally to the Greenstar Camray on sale before, the new model has had a complete internal redesign. The secondary heat exchanger has been made significantly larger, to further improve efficiency, and the unit incorporates real efforts by Worcester to improve maintenance access and reduce servicing times. We were really impressed with this one, and think it moves the product significantly ahead of offerings by the other manufacturers.
We sited the new boiler on concrete slabs in case of flooding, because just a couple of inches can make all the difference between needing a new burner, and no damage.
We found the existing unvented cylinder (installed four years ago) had been connected to a 3 port diverter valve, had no tundish and the emergency discharge finished four inches above the hall floor rather than going outside. We than found the wiring had been similarly bodged, resulting in the cylinder adjustable and overheat thermostats being completely bypassed. Unvented cylinders can be dangerous if installed incorrectly and this one had every single safety device either inoperative or incorrectly installed. Needless to say, the installer had ‘forgotten’ to fill out the cylinder ‘benchmark’ report or register the installation with building control.
All these non-conformances were rectified as part of our work.
The kitchen did not have a radiator, as a new kitchen had been installed in place of the old radiator. We recommended fitting a ‘Smiths SpaceSaver’ fan convector heater in the plinth of the kitchen unit; this uses heat from the radiator system and a small electric fan. It is very effective in kitchens where there is no wall space left.
The existing pipework and radiators were Powerflushed, while linked together with our additional Adey Magnacleanse magnetic filtration system. The combination of these two items is incredibly effective, and vastly improves the results we used to get by Powerflushing alone. It is more labour intensive, because on dirty systems the bare rod magnets pull an enormous amount of debris out of the water, and they have to be continually removed and cleaned during the process.
When the job was finished in freezing temperatures, we thanked our customer for the seemingly endless cups of tea and coffee, and he even posed alongside his new oil boiler, which is covered by a Bosch 5yr warranty.

A visibly relieved customer is now ready for Christmas.
By the time you read this the house might have warmed up.