Nursing Home fast track boiler plant cascade renewal during COVID lockdown

Our case study today refers to a job we carried out in the first lockdown in 2020. A local care home had earlier used our services to repair a Worcester boiler in a wing of their building. We got a call during the first COVID lockdown, when everyone was at home and the roads were deserted. Their main boiler plant was giving problems and they wanted us to look at it. The main boiler room looked quite ordered from the outside; two flues sticking out had cages and it looked purpose made. however once the door was opened things didn’t […]
Viessmann Cascade in large house

For our case study today, we were called to inspect a large house in Surrey, completely refurbished around 7 years ago, with multiple underfloor and radiator heating zones. The house had a basement boiler room, containing a pair of 46Kw Vaillant EcoTec 46Kw light commercial boilers, using a cascaded flue system and a header. A maintenance company had paid a number of visits to keep the boilers running, but they were plagued with frequent reliability problems. The last inspection had also raised issues with the flue header and chimney lining installation, even though they had been maintaining it for years […]
New warm air unit replaces Johnson & Starley Economaire

Today we are in the Crystal Palace region of South London. Our customer has a J&S Economaire 50 warm air unit. Over the last few years the unit has become somewhat unreliable and needed resetting frequently. Her warm air maintenance company had made some ultimately unsuccessful efforts to improve it, so it was time to replace. We recommended a MultiCalor Udara 15Kw downflow unit, this is from a manufacturer we are familiar with, having fitted many of their MC range air handling units over the last 10 years. The Udara range was launched three years ago and features a wide […]
Game changing oil boiler installation in Leatherhead, Surrey, 10 year warranty.

Oil boilers are considered to be rather outdated now, what with the UK Government pledging* to have us all driving around in electric cars and heating our homes with hydrogen. While not saying where the electricity, or the hydrogen, will be coming from, of course. *Sensibly, these promises are being made with a timescale of at least 15 years away, meaning they are worthless. Amidst these pontifications, a boiler manufacturer has quietly beavered away and come up with a very low Nox (Nitrous Oxide) oil boiler; in fact, it is billed as the least polluting oil boiler you can install […]
Johnson & Starley warm air replaced by Worcester Bosch boiler and EasyControl

This case study begins in a terraced house in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. A kitchen renewal has a short while ago necessitated the warm air heater being relocated into the garage. Our customer had some concerns over the way this part of the work had been carried out, and it turned out they were right to be worried. Generally speaking, moving a warm air unit is not easy… there’s ductwork deep under the floors, which are usually concrete, and most older warm air units have a vertical ‘open’ flue, akin to a fireplace. So moving the box itself isn’t difficult, it […]
Underwater listed building, novel oil flue system

Here we have an unusual case study. It is a listed building in a rural part of Kent, UK, on top of a hilly area. It has a large cellar covering most of the floor area of the house. In very heavy rainfall in 2019, the road (some considerable distance from the house) became flooded, and due to some collapsed drainage on the highway, a very large amount of water gathered in a pond. At some point during the night, the water found its way into a cellar light, smashed the window, and quickly filled the entire cellar, all the […]
ATAG Opentherm Evohome Sevenoaks

Today we are in Sevenoaks, Kent, in a road where we now have installed at least three boilers, and three Evohome multi zone systems too! Our customer knew about heating systems, and chose an ATAG i series boiler. He wanted a unit that was of high quality manufacture, and one that could use Opentherm controls, so that the house could modulate the boiler intelligently. As the local ATAG and Honeywell Evohome specialists, we were asked to advise and quote for the job. A leaking Ideal condensing boiler was scrapped, and the plan was to fit the ATAG in the same […]
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 […]